The best television shows of 2018 comprised a bounty of varied perspectives and disparate storytelling styles. Look closely, though, and many of the yearâs more rewarding shows were attuned to the rigors of human existence, and curious about the pliable concept of identityâbe it the identity of a horny teen on Big Mouth, of New York City on The Deuce, or of subjugated women on The Handmaidâs Tale.

In the second season of GLOW, the eponymous wrestlers struggle for screen time on their show within the show, and simultaneously tangle with the fallout of the characters they craft for themselves in the ring. Despite The Good Place upending its stakes and setting, the showâs relentlessly likeable characters continue to underpin its sunny disposition with an earnest investigation of how our moral identities are forged. And as shows such as Atlanta, Pose, and Dear White People broadened televisionâs definition of âweâ in 2018, one of the mediumâs overarching questions seemed to be: âWhy are we this way?â

As one answer to that question, The Haunting of Hill House complemented its scares with an equally harrowing portrait of a damaged family. Atlanta and Bojack Horseman found a response in the ceaseless, pummeling nature of everyday life, while Dear White People, The Handmaidâs Tale, and Barry wondered if we are what other peopleâwhite people, the patriarchy, exploitative bossesâsay we are. Other shows, such as Bobâs Burgers, were delightful reprieves from reality, though one could certainly find poignancy in that showâs portrayal of middle-class America.

This yearâs list shares only nine entries with last year, a fact that highlights the breadth of a TV landscape thatâs abundant in shows with limited runs. In some cases, shows made a qualitative leap in their second seasons; in others, bold newcomers quickly established themselves among TVâs upper echelon. Almost all of these showsâeven the most joyfully escapist among themâseemed preoccupied in 2018 with the forces which make us who we are. Michael Haigis

25. The Terror

Based on the true story of a failed British expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the mid-19th century, The Terror explores the toxic combination of arrogance and bravery that fuels the exploratory missions launched by great colonial powers. After getting stuck for a year and a half in Artic ice, the men, weakened by lead poisoning and fighting the elements, set off on foot in search of salvation. The Terror brings those awful facts vividly aliveâand then goes further, creating a full-blown horror story by introducing a monster called the Tuunbaq, which looks something like a giant polar bear with a human face. The men divide into two factions, battling one another as well as the monster while dying in increasingly baroque ways. Scenes like a fire that ravages a camp, trapping dozens of people in flaming tents just as the men are having a rare night of celebration, ramp up the sense of claustrophobic terror, which only gets worse when the mad leader of one of the factions begins to cannibalize his enemies. Throughout it all, the Tuunbaq keeps decimating their ranks while growing increasingly weakened by the bullets they empty into himâand, presumably, the lead he ingests when he eats them. Like other classic movie monsters, the Tuunbaq is an unsettling metaphor for the way humans throw nature itself out of balance when we gain too much power. Elise Nakhnikian

24. Mosaic

Steven Soderbergh understands that he must grab us in this century of endless distraction, and his efforts to hold our attention in Mosaic parallel the charactersâ attempts to corral chaos into a functional narrative. In the guise of mounting a murder mystery, the filmmaker attempts to push narrative out of a classical three-act format. Mosaicâs episodes could be watched in any order and theyâd still have a dizzying emotional and intellectual effect, suggesting less what we know than what we donât. As he did in films such as The Limey and Side Effects, Soderbergh fashions found and abstract poetry out of the hard lines of the lairs of the rich and famous. His formalism suggests a wonderfully unlikely fusion of the films of Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni with lurid noir. Mosaic suggests a mammoth world that exists beyond his rigorously structured narrative, as every textured shot and stray bit of humor hints at the wild humanity existing under the controlled institutions and mannerisms that we collectively call society. Chuck Bowen

23. Silicon Valley

Despite losing T.J. Miller as its resident frenemy/douchebro, Silicon Valley successfully maintained its trademark undercurrent of pettiness and macho one-upmanship throughout its fifth season. The new season contained two of the showâs best episodes to date, âReorientationâ and âFifty-One Percent,â the former a master class in throwing techie shade, the latter so perfectly succinct it could have served as the series finale. As always, Silicon Valley casts a satirical gaze on timely tech topics, with this season focusing on Bitcoin, net neutrality, employee poaching, artificial intelligence, the all-consuming blob called Amazon, and the inexplicable allure of Tesla cars. The writers also took their most biting jabs at Information Technology by offering up a vicious parable on the technological and psychological effects of sexual harassment. Directed by Gillian Robespierre, âFacial Recognitionâ showed that not even female robots are immune to the whims of horny men in power. Additionally, this season benefitted from the consistently reliable physicality of its lead, Thomas Middleditch. Richard Hendricks continues to grow, applying the things heâs learned in prior seasons while still managing to make the same mistakes. Heâs the perfect counterbalance to Martin Starrâs droll-as-always Gilfoyle, a dead-on impersonation of your average programmer and still the showâs secret weapon. Odie Henderson

22. Pose

This soulful soap operatic drama pays tribute to New York Cityâs ball culture of the 1980s. Painting in broad, dramatic strokes, the script highlights the factorsâracism, homophobia, transphobia, AIDS, and the wealth gapâthat inspired these men and women to create their own world and faux families, where they could show one another the love and respect that they couldnât find anywhere else. Balancing out the showâs earnest speeches and righteous crusades is plenty of sheer, campy joy, much of it provided by the balls that cap off most of the episodes. Itâs an endearingly lumpy mix, made even more so by the uneven quality of the acting, but that very lack of polish is a large part of why the series works. Like the original ball scene, with all its homemade fabulosity, Pose aspires to a level of perfection it canât quite achieveâand wins us over with the sheer heart and humanity of its effort. Nakhnikian

21. Fauda

Unlike Homeland, which is based on another Israeli series, Fauda makes no attempt to cover the political debates or social context behind its constant action. Instead, like its main characters, it keeps its head down and its focus tight. The series follows the fictional members of an elite undercover unit of the Israeli army and whichever Palestinian freedom fighter/terrorist that Doron (Lior Raz), a rogue member of the unit, is obsessed with that season, while occasionally checking in with a handful of other Israelis and Palestiniansâfamily members, lovers, or commanding officersâwho either affect or are affected by the main charactersâ actions. Fauda (Arabic for âchaosâ) is particularly good at showing how war, especially one with no end in sight, poisons the lives of everyoneâeven civilians. While most of the women on the perimeter of the action have relatively modest dreams, just hoping to marry the man they love or keep their children safe, they inevitably get sucked into the maelstrom, losing their peace of mind, their loved ones, and sometimes their lives. Their romances sometimes stretch credulity, particularly this season when, despite actress LaĂ«titia EĂŻdoâs excellent work, Shirin, a dedicated Palestinian doctor, risks becoming a mere symbol of suffering as Doron and Shirinâs young militant cousin Walid (Shadi Marâi) treat her like the rope in a macho game of tug of war. But the way killings and atrocities keep piling up on both sides, creating more trauma and more would-be martyrs by the day, feels all too believable. Nakhnikian

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Editorâs Note: This article was originally published on July 8, 2015.

10. Stand by Me (1986)

Those who accuse Stand by Me of indulging shameless boomer nostalgia are missing the point, as thatâs precisely what the film is about. Director Rob Reiner dials down the violent hopelessness of Kingâs source material (the novella The Body), but still emphasizes the cruelty and loneliness that mark four boysâ coming-of-age odyssey to see the corpse of a young man nearly their age. The film is framed as one of the grown boyâs remembrances, as he attempts to spin his unreconciled feelings into the more tangible stuff ofâŠcoming-of-age fiction. At times itâs hokey, and, yes, the soundtrack does some major emotional heavy lifting, but the feast of excellent acting compensates greatly, particularly by Wil Wheaton, Kiefer Sutherland, and River Phoenix. Stand by Me remains one of the best adaptations of Kingâs more sentimental non-horror writing, and itâs far superior to preachy, insidiously insulting staples like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.

9. Creepshow (1982)

Still one of the great comic-book movies in that it approximates the actual tactile act of reading and flipping through a magazine, ideally on a rainy Saturday afternoon with a can of soda by your side. George Romero directed from Kingâs original script, which pays homage to EC comics like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, and the filmmaker displays a visual confidence and tonal flexibility thatâs reminiscent of his Dawn of the Dead. The bright, deep, and garish cinematography is both beautiful and disturbing, enriching Kingâs gleefully vicious writing while providing a framework for the lively performances of a game, celebrity-rich cast. The film straddles an ideal line between straight-faced seriousness and parody, particularly in the unnerving climax of a story in which we can hear the pained gurgling of aquatic zombies.

8. Silver Bullet (1985)

A creepy drive-in horror movie that throws a werewolf into a boyâs sentimental coming-of-age tale. Based on Kingâs slim Cycle of the Werewolf, which was released with gorgeous illustrations by artist Bernie Wrightson, Silver Bullet weds evocative imagery with spare plotting that allows each scene to breathe, giving the film an nightmarish free-associative energy. There are several boffo sequences, particularly when the werewolf seizes a manâs baseball bat, his paw shown to be beating the man to death from below thick fog, or when the wolf is outsmarted by the protagonist, one of his eyes blown to pieces by a bottle rocket. Speaking of the monster, the movie has one of the great wolf designs, which suggests a huge, bitter, upstanding bear with a terrifying snout. The human identity of the creature is a great, characteristically blasphemous King twist.

7. Dolores Claiborne (1995)

Five years after her career-making performance in Misery, Kathy Bates returned to Stephen King territory with Dolores Claiborne, which, like the book, disappointed nearly everyone for not being a typical horror story, instead combining the traditions of martyred-woman melodrama with gothic mystery. Critics, who only seem capable of praising melodrama when itâs directed by one of their pre-approved canon placeholders (like Nicholas Ray or Douglas Sirk), also turned their noses up at Dolores Claiborne, and itâs a real shame. Both the novel and the film get at the heart of Kingâs preoccupations with sexism and classicism, spinning a fractured narrative of a mother, her daughter, the man who nearly ruined their lives, and the all-encompassing pitilessness of aging. Yes, the film is behaviorally broad, but this broadness is utilized by the reliably underrated director, Taylor Hackford, as a form of catharsis. And Batesâs performance as the titular character is positively poetic. Her delivery of a monologue about Doloresâs work routine particularly locate the weird, qualified dignity of thanklessness, reveling in the pride and transcendence that can be wrestled from menial-ness. Perhaps more than any other film on this list, Dolores Claiborne has the feel of Kingâs voice.

6. Misery (1990)

No one performs Kingâs dialogue like Kathy Bates. She embraces and owns the moving cuckoo logic of his best orations, understanding that theyâre almost always rooted in class anxiety. The most disturbing quality of Misery, both the novel and the film, is the fact that we relate to Annie Wilkes, psychotic ânumber one fanâ of author Paul Sheldon (superbly played in the film by James Caan), more than we do her victims. Bates is so intimately in tune with Annie that we feel for her when she fails to impress Paul, somehow temporarily forgetting that sheâs holding him hostage and torturing him. Annie is yet another of Kingâs unleashed nerds, a repressed soul seeking actualization, but she isnât sentimentalized, instead embodying the ferocious self-absorption that fuels obsession, leading to estrangement. Director Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman regrettably trim Kingâs most ambitiously subjective material, but they compensate by focusing pronouncedly on the cracked love story at the narrativeâs center.

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LuĂ­s, though, remains optimistic, as evinced by his tendency to burst into song as he drives between assignments, and by the quietly determined way in which he attempts to regain the affection of an old flame, Lucinda (Luisa Cruz), despite her apparent disdain for him. Antunes, in his first professional acting role, is compelling, with a perpetual twinkle in his eye that hints at a rich inner life. And while his vocal range is limited, to say the least, he brings an earnestness to the musical numbers that elevates them above mere quirky window dressing.

Ultimately, the film is too narratively slight and tonally monotonous to justify its two-hour running time. One running joke in particular, involving a smarmy executive whoâs frequently heard off screen but never seen, runs out of steam in the final act. And yet, when viewed in close proximity to the likes of Park Jung-bumâs dreary crime drama Height of the Wave, which bafflingly won this yearâs special jury prize, Technoboss is a breath of fresh air.

Runar Runarssonâs Echo isnât exactly a laugh a minute: An early scene depicts the preparation for a childâs funeral, while subsequent sequences revolve around police brutality, domestic violence, and the lasting impact of childhood bullying. But itâs delightful to behold Runarssonâs sly execution of a formally bold premise. Clocking in at 79 minutes, the film is composed of 56 standalone vignettes connected by a Christmas setting. The constant narrative shifts are initially jarring, but recurring themes begin to emerge: rising social inequality in the aftermath of the financial crisis; the impact of modern technology on traditional ways of life; the drabness of winter and its impact on the countryâs collective mental health.

Yet while the filmâs underlying tone is melancholic, there are frequent bursts of pure comedy, from the absurd spectacle of abattoir workers bopping along to a jaunty rendition of âJingle Bellsâ amid animal carcasses, to a farmer and her partner earnestly squabbling about the state of their relationship as they document the mating habits of their goats. Humor also arises through the juxtaposition of scenes. The haunting image of a boy in a coffin is followed by a clinical shot of a similarly motionless adult body, and it takes a moment to register that weâre looking at not another corpse, but rather a man lying under a tanning lamp. Later, a heartwarming kidsâ nativity scene cuts abruptly to a shot of bikini-clad bodybuilders performing in a harshly lit, half-empty auditorium.

However, itâs Echoâs sincerity that really impresses. One sequence, in which an emergency services operator calmly reassures a child reporting a violent altercation between his parents, is remarkable in the way it hooks the viewer emotionally in mere seconds. The film ultimately coheres into a vivid portrait of contemporary Iceland thatâs equal parts bleak and beguiling.

A Voluntary Year, co-directed by Berlin School alumni Ulrich KĂ¶hler and Henner Winckler, is a similarly bittersweet affair, walking a fine line between raw domestic drama and precision-engineered comedy of errors. Sebastian Rudolph stars as Urs, an off-puttingly pushy small-town doctor intent on packing his teenage daughter Jette (Maj-Britt Klenke) off to Costa Rica to volunteer in a hospital. Jette, though, would rather spend her gap year at home with her boyfriend, Mario (Thomas Schubert), who seems harmless enough but has been written off as a poisonous influence by Urs. A sequence of mishaps in the thrillingly unpredictable opening act gives the young couple a brief chance to take charge of their own futures, but the decision Jette hastily makes pushes her strained relationship with her father towards breaking point.

KĂ¶hler and Winckler do a fine job of eliciting sympathy for their deeply flawed characters. Jette is maddeningly indecisive and prone to overly dramatic outbursts, but her brash exterior masks deep-seated vulnerability. Meanwhile, itâs easy to share Ursâs disbelief that Jette should be even remotely infatuated with the woefully uncharismatic Mario, but the boyâs earnestness ultimately proves strangely endearing. Urs is much harder to warm to, as heâs the quintessential big fish in a small pond, clearly used to throwing his weight around and getting his own way. To add insult to injury, his handling of sensitive situations is often jaw-droppingly misjudged. And yet, the viewer is given a strong enough sense of his good intentions to at least partially root for him as he attempts to patch things up with Jette.

While it may not do this modest film any favors to make the comparison, there are shades of Maren Adeâs masterly Toni Erdmann in The Voluntary Yearâs nuanced depiction of a fraught father-daughter relationship, and also in the way the filmmakers play the long game when it comes to delivering comic payoffs. An enigmatic narrative thread involving a migrant boy has a laugh-out-loud resolution that also neatly paves the way for a moving final scene.

The poster boy of American conservatism, the bar to which all Republicans would unashamedly evaluate future candidates, and yet now seemingly lower on a weekly basis, Ronald Reagan was an ideal movie star with an idealized view of the past. His perfect America would be equivalent to the opening shots of red roses, green lawns, and white picket fences that kick off Blue Velvet, while Americaâs reality would be what transpires once Bobby Vintonâs song concludes and the swarming ants are revealed beneath the surface.

A time of Hollywood blockbusters and silver screen patriots, macho men and teens headed back to the future, the 1980s, while not considered a golden movie age, saw a symbiotic relationship between American film and the nationâs chosen leader. How else to account for Reagan proposing his âStar Warsâ strategic defense initiative in March of 1983, a mere two months before the release of the yearâs top grossing film, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi?

With his methodically researched new book, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, former Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman takes a sociological approach to discovering how the art of filmmaking, and the business of moviegoing, influenced, mirrored, and altered the goings-on of our 40th presidentâs administration. And on the occasion of the bookâs release and accompanying Film at Lincoln Center series, which samples feature films from the â80s, I spoke with Hoberman about the first Reagan screen performance he ever saw, being a working film critic during the âAge of Reagan,â and the unexpected rise of real estate mogul and Celebrity Apprentice host Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

One of your most revered books is Vulgar Modernism, a collection of reviews and essays written during the â80s without the benefit, or trappings, of historical hindsight. Now 30-some-odd years later, youâve taken a step back to take a look at the bigger picture of the decade. What was that experience like?

I should say that this book was the culmination of two earlier books, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War. Make My Day is the end of a trilogy. When I began writing the trilogy, I didnât realize how central Reagan would be to it, but by the time I started Make My Day, he had become, in effect, the protagonist of the entire trilogy. Make My Day was different from the other two books. Itâs not just that I lived through this period, but that I was then a working critic. How was I going to deal with that? In the earlier books, I went out of my way to quote critics and others who wrote about movies because I was very interested in how these films were initially received. In the case of Make My Day, however, it seemed absurd to quote other critics when I was there myself. It took me a while to come to that conclusion because my impulse wasnât to put myself in the book and yet I realized that I would ultimately have to.

I found that my opinion of the various movies discussed hadnât changed all that much. My opinion of Reagan was modified somewhat, in that I saw him as a more complicated figure than I did during the 1980s, but I also believe my response to him in the â80s was true to the moment. Thatâs why I included a number of longer pieces in the book, while also annotating them, so that one could see that I wasnât just reusing the material without thinking about it.

You note that each volume can be read in chronological order, the order in which they were published, or as standalone installments. I took it up after finishing your and Jonathan Rosenbaumâs Midnight Movies, and it felt like I was emerging from the pre-â80s underground to a Reaganized American society that had become depressingly anything but countercultural. What was it like being on the underground and Hollywood beat as a critic throughout those years?

I didnât really start reviewing the blockbuster films until around 1984. I was the Village Voiceâs second-string critic when Andrew Sarris, the first-string critic, fell ill, and I took his spot for a while. As a result, I was reviewing movies that I might otherwise not have. To make things interesting for myself, I began reviewing these movies from a political and ideological perspective. Even when Andy came back, that stayed with me. So, for example, there were a lot of action films during that period that Andy was very glad not to review, like Top Gun, but I did those while also reviewing foreign films, avant-garde films, documentaries, and so on. I always said that I could never be a first-string critic for a newspaper. I would have lost my mind having a steady diet of big Hollywood movies! I would have had to mix things up.

While midnight movies arenât the primary focus of Make My Day, the underground did find a way into your reviews of â80s blockbusters. I recall a review in the Voice titled âWhite Boys: Lucas, Spielberg, and the Temple of Dumbâ in which you tear down the nostalgic Indiana Jones prequel while praising Jack Smithâs nostalgic Normal Love. Was it maddening for you to review the latest Spielberg while underground artists concurrently made the same points to much smaller audiences?

That was really something that came from the heart. I was outraged by Temple of Doom, by its attitude, and I was really sick of these guys, Spielberg and Lucas. I wanted to bring out that there were other forms of filmmaking and other ways of dealing with this material. I was making a point, yes, but it was something that was fueled by emotion rather than reason.

Were there any Spielberg films, or Spielberg-adjacent films like Gremlins or Poltergeist, that you found less than risible throughout the Reagan years?

There were some that I preferred. I liked Gremlins quite a bit, and I enjoyed Back to the Future, which is Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. At the time, I didnât much care for Poltergeist, but when I looked at it again for the book, I thought it was interesting in terms of its pathology. I should also say that I liked Jaws and E.T., to a degree, although it was no Blade Runner.

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Though primarily concerned with Reganâs political reign, you also dig deep into his filmography, noting how his sole villainous role, in The Killers, has always prompted a vocal reaction from every audience youâve watched it with. Why do you think that is?

Well, Iâm not sure thatâs still true. A friend recently saw The Killers at Film Forum and told me he was sort of shocked that people didnât respond to the scene where Reagan slaps Angie Dickinson. The first time I saw The Killers, which was, I think, in June of 1969, I didnât expect to see Reagan in it. I donât think I had seen him in a movie before. I was well aware of who he was, of course, and I hated him because I had been at Berkeley the previous summer, when students were public enemy number one and there were disturbances every nightâthe whole thing was extremely compelling for me as a 19-year-old. The point I wanted to make was that my whole view of Reagan was predicated on The Killers. To me, he seemed to be playing himself. I had a very naĂŻve response. I couldnât understand why he would do the role. I mean, what crazy hubris prompted him to show what he dreamed of becoming on screen? I recognize my response as primitive, but it also demonstrates the power of movie images. I didnât see him as acting, even though he clearly is. I saw it as him projecting his evil, bastardly essence.

Speaking of essence, itâs odd re-watching Donald Trumpâs numerous cameos in American film and television. Unlike Reaganâs silver-screen presence, Trump literally always played himself: an obscenely rich braggadocio. Whereas Reaganâs âlovableâ persona no doubt helped his later career in politics, Trumpâs media appearances helped to fortify his reputation as an arrogant huckster.

This is the point I tried to make at the end of the book. I was surely thinking about Trump a lot while writing the book, but he only became president when I was close to finishing it. Trump may have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, but it doesnât come as a result of the movies. Heâs a celebrity and a celebrity is someone whoâs able to project a cartoon version of themselves, or a larger-than-life version of themselves, into the media world: TV, the tabloid press, and so on. Trump is being true to this persona. I didnât really see Trumpâs presidency coming. For me, he was a New York City character, a local celebrity who was regularly exposed in the Village Voiceâs narrative of New York City corruption. I had no sense of how he existed to the rest of America, in Celebrity Apprentice. Clearly thatâs what put him over, or at least helped to put him over. That and his appearances on Fox News as a kind of pundit and even his involvement with professional wrestling.

As you mention in your book, the uncomfortably awkward 1979 CBS Ted Kennedy sit-down interview with Roger Mudd ultimately derailed Kennedyâs attempt at a presidential run. Itâs hard to imagine, given the feckless attempts by our current political leaders to appear like an everyman, that current presidential candidatesâ chances could be derailed by the televised struggle to answer a basic question. If anything, we might view the guffaw as endearing and humanizing. Trump says dumb stuff on a daily basis, and we all just accept it. Have we become desensitized to politicians being put on the spot and not being able to come up with succinct answers?

I think itâs different for different candidates. Being the younger brother of J.F.K., who was the first real political star, created a lot of expectations. People credit Kennedyâs success in the 1960 election with his appearance in the first debate, for looking so much better than Nixon. That may be simplistic, but itâs not simplistic for people to think that TV had something to do with Kennedy becoming president. I think this is a case of âlive by the sword, die by the sword,â that his brother just stumbled so badly in that interview, in what was essentially his television debut. He did go on all the way to the 1980 Democratic National Convention, but the myth of the Kennedy charm and invincibility was destroyed by that interview.

Looking at subsequent presidents, Reagan certainly had an elastic sense of reality. But in his distortions and lies and misstatements, he was by and large upbeat and, when he wasnât, he was at least coherent. Trump lies so continuously that you feel that that must be part of his appeal for his base, that heâs just going to make this stuff up. They think itâs funny or entertaining or maybe that it represents a âgreater degree of authenticity.â

There had been a very interesting point made by Theodor W. Adorno about Hitlerâs appeal. Iâm not saying that Trump is Hitler, but heâs a demagogue and Hitler was too. Adorno, who lived through Hitlerâs lies, made the point that intellectuals and serious people didnât get Hitlerâs appeal. Before he came to power, he just seemed like a clown. There was something ridiculous about Hitlerâs assertions and his tantrums. What they didnât realize was thatâs precisely what his fans liked about him. I think thatâs also the case with Trump and his supporters.

If Nashville, as you point out in the book, foresaw the real-life presidential assassination attempts that were soon to come, could you see the same cinematic influences happening today? Are there films today that you think are foreshadowing things that could come into fruition within our own political future?

Nashville was a movie made at a time when movies were much more central to American culture than they are now. It was made by a filmmaker, Robert Altman, who was directly addressing, as an artist, what was going on. I bracketed Nashville with Jaws because in some respects, Jaws is a similar movie, although Iâm not sure if Spielberg was consciously making an allegory. Some things in the film are political, for example the behavior of the Mayor of Amity, but beyond that the movie itself was utterly central to American culture. There was nothing more important during the summer of 1975 than Jaws. Thereâs no movie that has that kind of centrality anymore, nor do movies as a whole.

A number of television shows seemed to be predicting Hillary Clinton before the 2016 election. There were shows like Madam Secretary and Veep and Homeland, strong, female, political heroes, or, in the case of Veep, comic. But what were they compared to Celebrity Apprentice? Those aforementioned shows were very feeble in terms of reaching an audience and I think it was more a projection of the people who made it. When I look at movies now, and I have to say that I donât see as many movies as I used to, I see some that seem to manifest things that are in the air. Jordan Peeleâs Get Out would be the best example of this. That movie was made and conceived while Obama was president, but it certainly projected the post-Trump mood. Quentin Tarantinoâs Once Upon a TimeâŠin Hollywood is interesting because, on the one hand, itâs a movie about 1969, and yet itâs also a movie about 2019. It canât help but manifest some of our current fantasies and tensions. But even if it had a bigger audience than Nashville, people just arenât taking it the same way.

And Once Upon a TimeâŠin Hollywood presents a cinematic take that has a romanticized, almost fetishistic view of a 1969 that never truly existed, at least not the way Tarantino wishes it didâŠ

Well, thatâs certainly one way to look at it. I would put it somewhat differently, but we can let people discover for themselves if they havenât seen it!

The book also talks a great deal about the revisionism and idealization of specific time periods that were said to represent wholesome Americana. The â50s is a big one, but as you point out, the moviesâ view of the â50s were drastically different from the one the world actually experienced. I remember growing up in the â90s convinced Happy Days was a TV show not just about the â50s, but from the â50s itself.

That makes perfect sense, and I think other people share that same experience. The genius of that show is that it portrayed the â50s âas it should have been.â Jean Baudrillard has a memorable description of walking in to see Peter Bogdanovichâs 1971 black-and-white film The Last Picture Show and, for a moment, thinking it was actually a movie from the period it depicted: the early â50s. It was a hyper-real version of it. Thatâs what Happy Days was. I think Reaganâs genius was to be able to do that on a larger scale, to conjure up an idealized â60s almost out of whole cloth, vague memories, old television, and old movies in his own conviction, even if that was ultimately a fantasy. It was an idealization of the period.

On the occasion of your bookâs release, youâve programmed a selection of double features for an upcoming series at Film at Lincoln Center. Outside of a closeness in release dates, like The Last Temptation of Christ and They Live, what went into the pairing up of certain titles?

I appreciate that question. I really love the concept of double bills. Whenever itâs possible, I like to teach using double bills, because then the movies can talk to each otherâand I donât have to talk as much. Ideally the movies should comment on each other. The reason for including The Last Temptation of Christ was a bit tricky. I thought that the response that it got certainly looked forward to the culture wars of the â90s. There was such hostility directed toward that movie and, by extension, the movie industry as a whole. As Trump would say, it was as âan enemy of the people.â And to me, They Live seems to be the bluntest, most direct critique of Reaganism ever delivered, and it was delivered at the very, very end of his presidency. In a sense, it was already over, as the film came out just before the 1988 presidential election. I see both They Live and The Last Temptation as political movies, one overtly political and one that was taken in a political manner.

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The 100 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time

âThe [sci-fi] film has never really been more than an offshoot of its literary precursor, which to date has provided all the ideas, themes and inventiveness. [Sci-fi] cinema has been notoriously prone to cycles of exploitation and neglect, unsatisfactory mergings with horror films, thrillers, environmental and disaster movies.â So wrote J.G. Ballard about George Lucasâs Star Wars in a 1977 piece for Time Out. If Ballardâs view of science-fiction cinema was highly uncharitable and, as demonstrated by the 100 boldly imaginative and mind-expanding films below, essentially off-base, he nevertheless touched on a significant point: that literary and cinematic sci-fi are two fundamentally different art forms.

Fritz Langâs Metropolis, a visionary depiction of a near-future dystopia, is almost impossible to imagine as a work of prose fiction. Strip away the Art Deco glory of its towering cityscapes and factories and the synchronized movements of those who move through those environments and whatâs even left? Itâs no accident that some of the greatest cinematic adaptations of sci-fi novels bear only a passing resemblance to their source material. Ridley Scottâs Blade Runner, for example, simply mines some of the concepts from Phillip K. Dickâs Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? about human-looking androids, using them as the raw material for a haunting urban future-noir that owes more to visual artists like Moebius and Antonio SantâElia than it does to Dick himself. Then thereâs Andrei Tarkovskyâs Stalker, which transfigures Arkady and Boris Strugatskyâs briskly paced novella Roadside Picnic into a slow, mesmerizing journey into an uncanny space.

Ballard may have been right that literary sci-fi has provided all the interesting themes and ideas for which sci-fi in general has become known, but he failed to grasp how cinema has expanded our understanding of sci-fi by pricking at our collective visual consciousness. The titles on our list of the 100 best sci-fi movies of all time have shown us utopias, dystopias, distant planets, and our own Earth destroyed. Some of these depictions are humorous, others haunting. Some rely on complicated special effects, others use none at all. But theyâre united by their fearlessness in breaking down boundaries and thrusting us into worlds beyond our own. Keith Watson

100. Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980)

Ken Russellâs psychedelic Altered States examines one manâs egregious deflection of paternal responsibility in the name of scientific innovation. Fantasy and self-indulgence are the most powerful narcotics in the filmâdrugs that allow Harvard scientist Dr. Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) to flirt with an increasingly volatile dream state where, as he puts it, âtime simply obliterates.â Consumed by religious repression and self-guilt regarding his fatherâs painful death from cancer decades ago, Eddie becomes addicted to medicating his own primal urges through lengthy self-deprivation experiments. The theme of escape dominates the film, especially during Eddieâs visit with a native tribe from Central Mexico where a peyote session causes Eddie to hallucinate, visualized by Russell as a nightmarish dreamscape of striking imagery. Itâs an incredibly subjective sequence, placing the viewer inside Eddieâs headspace during a lengthy and jarring slide show from hell. Lava flows, sexual acts, and animal disembowelment all crash together, images that take on even more symbolic meaning later in the film when Eddie begins to evolve physically into a simian form. Glenn Heath Jr.

A film as brilliantly constructed as it is titled, JindĆich PolĂĄkâs Tomorrow Iâll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea is a swinging comedy about a secret cabal of Nazis whoâve discovered the secret of time travel and are intent on using it to go back to World War II and supply Hitler with an atomic bomb. The plot also involves a pair of twins, mistaken identities, and anti-ageing pills, and yet, despite having to keep all these narrative balls in the air, the film never feels convoluted or over-stuffed. Instead, itâs a delightfully wacky farce that treats its potentially terrifying premise with cheerfully irreverent humor, exemplified by the filmâs opening credits, which feature archival footage of Hitler manipulated to make it look like heâs boogieing to disco music. And if all thatâs still not enough, PolĂĄkâs film also offers a nifty showcase of some of the grooviest low-budget futuristic production design the â70s Soviet bloc had to offer. Watson

98. Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980)

A gleefully cheesy throwback to the sci-fi serials of yesteryear, Mike Hodgesâs Flash Gordon is as pure a camp spectacle as youâre likely to find. A glitzyâat times garishâextravaganza of brightly colored sets, skin-baring costumes, and otherworldly vistas that wouldnât seem out of place in the gatefold of a Yes album, the film is silly and cartoonish in the best sense of those terms. Featuring such outlandish characters as the fu manchu-sporting villain Ming the Merciless (Max Von Sydow), Prince Vultan (Brian Blessed, bare-legged and sporting giant metallic wings), and the blank-eyed beefcake at the center of it all, Flash (Sam J. Jones), the film is very much in on its own joke. Produced by Dino de Laurentiis to cash in on the post-Star Wars mania for space-opera flicks, Flash Gordon ultimately has more in common with tongue-in-cheek cult musicals like Phantom of the Paradise and Xanadu than it does with George Lucasâs action-packed monomyth. Thatâs thanks in large part to the rip-roaring soundtrack by Queen, whose spirited pomposity seamlessly complements the filmâs flamboyant comic-strip visual delights. Watson

97. The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933)

James Whaleâs anarchically playful The Invisible Man is an outlier among Universalâs line of classic monster movies. More of an inventive mash-up of black comedy and sci-fi than true horror, the film is an incendiary piece of speculative fiction that counterbalances its cautionary-tale tropes by perpetually reveling in the chaos its megalomaniacal protagonist stirs up, even as his intensifying violent impulses shift from harmlessly prankish to straight-up lethal. This pervasive sense of moral ambiguity is only strengthened by Whaleâs decision to keep Claud Rainsâs Dr. Jack Griffin invisible until the filmâs closing seconds and elide his characterâs backstory altogether. Griffinâs unknowability and cryptic motivations are mirrored in his literal invisibility, allowing his corruption and unquenchable thirst for power to take on a universal quality that implicates the audience even as it as it entertains them. Derek Smith

96. The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles, 1984)

A gentle-hearted satire on race and the immigrant experience, John Saylesâs The Brother from Another Planet follows an unnamed mute extra-terrestrial (Joe Morton) who, after crash-landing in the Hudson River, navigates life in the Big Apple. The hook, of course, is that while this âbrotherâ hails from a far-off planet, to the people of New York, he looks like just another black guy. This premise, which couldâve been mined for easy laughs or obvious platitudes about racism, is instead, in Saylesâs hands, a sensitive, socially observant fable about the difficulties of assimilation. The brother is, in all senses of the term, an alien: far from home, isolated from those around him, unsure how to navigate local social interactions, and, ultimately, unsure if he belongs in this world at all. Bolstered by Mortonâs soulful lead performanceâfew have ever made the act of listening so compelling to watchâSaylesâs film is science fiction at its most succinct and humane. Watson

95. Days of Eclipse (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1988)

Aleksandr Sokurovâs Days of Eclipse opens with a majestic birdsâ eye view tracking shot of a desolate desert landscape. As the camera speeds up, it descends from the heavens, violently crashing into the ground in a poverty-stricken Turkmenistani community. The shot invokes a metaphorical image of invasion, and after a hard cut, weâre offered a blistering glimpse of that invasionâs impact: a landscape neglected to the point of decay, crumbling amid the oppressive heat and other inexplicable natural phenomena. Alternating between drab sepia tones and more vividly colorful footage, Sokurov films a multicultural community through the disoriented, foreign eyes of Malyanov (Aleksei Ananishnov), a Russian physician sent on a vague mission to bring modern science to the village. But Malyanov remains a stranger in a strange land, unable to commune with the shell-shocked villagers, whose trauma and desperation has rendered them alien to all outsiders. Like Andrei Tarkovskyâs Stalker and Aleksei Germanâs Hard to Be a God, both also based on novels by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Days of Eclipse transforms an ordinary landscape into something mystical and otherworldly. And in this film in particular, it perfectly embodies the unbridgeable disconnect between colonizer and colonized. Smith

94. Voyage to the End of the Universe (JindĆich PolĂĄk, 1963)

While some Czech New Wave filmmakers in the 1960s explored the interconnected social and political foibles of people in their home country, Jindrich PolĂĄkâs effects-laden Voyage to the End of the Universe trades the oppressed Soviet-ruled Czech Republic for the outer reaches of the cosmos. The journey of the starship Ikarie XB-1 in searching for life on another planet isnât without the Czech New Waveâs notable playfulness when detailing how travelers cope with the monotony of space travel (hereâs looking at you, dance party sequence), though PolĂĄk expresses a darkly fatalistic worldview as well. If the haunting sequence of Ikarie XB-1 crew members finding a doomed ship that went on a similar mission is any indication, PolĂĄk suggests that sheer advancements in innovation and searching for a new life-sustaining planet is ultimately an exercise in futility, since human life, in both the individual sense and as a species, will end at some point. It seems we might as well, like the filmâs bored cosmonauts, just simply let go and dance the night away. Wes Greene

93. The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951)

Legend has it that The Thing from Another World was helmed not by its credited director, Christian Nyby, but by producer Howard Hawks. The film certainly provides ample evidence to suggest that such a covert switch occurred, as the its controlled atmosphere of dread and abundant rapid-fire repartee between the primary players seem to have been molded according to Hawksâs trademark template. Regardless, what remains most remarkable about the film is its continued ability to function as both a taut science-fiction thriller and a telling snapshot of the Cold War paranoia beginning to sweep the country in post-WWII America. The story, about the battle between a group of stranded military personnel and an alien creature fueled by human blood, is a model of economic storytelling. The conflict between Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and Dr. Arthur Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) is one between Force and Reason, and represents a debate over whether America should cope with its Soviet adversaries through military confrontation or intellectual and diplomatic study. Given the â50s political climate, itâs no surprise that the filmâs climax answers such a question by painting the sympathetic Carrington as a danger to mankind and the violent Hendry as a heroic warrior. Nick Schager

92. The Worldâs End (Edgar Wright, 2013)

Edgar Wright wrapped up his Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy with The Worldâs End, a rollicking alien-invasion ode to boozing up and moving on that bests even Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz in its comingling of hilarious buddy humor, aesthetically electric action, and genre shout-outsmanship. The story of a group of high school friends reunited to complete a famed pub crawl at the behest of their once-great, now-pitiful leader (Simon Pegg), only to find that their sleepy rural England hometown has been turned into a picture-perfect haven for extraterrestrial cyborg pod people, Wrightâs film is a blistering barrage of contentious one-liners and CG-ified mayhem. Staged with the directorâs usual high-wire dexterity and bolstered a cast that handles whip-crack dialogue with giddy aplomb, itâs the filmmakerâs most exciting, inventive, and purely entertaining mash-up to dateânot to mention, in its alternately sympathetic and critical portrait of a man-child navigating the literal and figurative pitfalls of growing up, also his most heartfelt. Schager

âReally, itâs just about peopleâwhether they conform to what we think they are,â says Kelvin Harrison Jr.âs eponymous character in Luce. The high school student is engaged in a classroom debate with his history teacher, the self-appointed respectability politics enforcer Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer), but he also speaks to the very essence of the film itself. Luceâs plot takes a number of engrossing turns as characters attempt to reconcile the disparities between the people they know so well and the deeds others allege they committed. But it all comes back to the characters themselves, Luce chief among them.

At his core, Luce is a model student thriving in suburban Arlington after being pulled out of an Eritrean war zone. Describing him further proves difficult because he means so many things to different people, some of whomâespecially his adoptive white parents (played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) and school facultyâmaintain an investment in seeing that he fulfills their expectations. From there, it only requires a few misunderstandings to ignite a powder keg of anxieties and assumptions surrounding race, class, immigration, and privilege.

While this description might seem to cast Luce as merely a passive participant in the story, nothing could be farther from the truth. Heâs the filmâs central enigma, with each scene concealing as much about his nature as it reveals. Harrison, a 25-year-old rising star whoâs already turned in psychologically complex work in films such as Monsters and Men and It Comes at Night, endows the film with equal parts pathos and pathology through his performance. Shortly after Luceâs theatrical bow, I sat down with both Harrison and director Julius Onah to discuss their approach to creating the filmâs central character, how they navigated his many dualities, and where they made determinations about his sincerity.

Who is Luce, for each of you? Inasmuch as itâs possible to pin him down.

Julius Onah: Whew!

Kelvin Harrison Jr.: Heâs a 17-year-old kid whoâs insanely intelligent. Heâs gone through, seen, and overcome a lot. As he moves forward, heâs trying to make sure he feels protected and seenâthat heâs not put, like he says, in a box and that his peers arenât doing the same. He feels like the future generation is the future, so shouldnât we all be supporting each other to do that? That makes him the budding revolutionary he wants to beâand is, in a lot of ways.

JO: As Kelvin said, we viewed him as this budding revolutionary, this kid who has incredible intellectual horsepower. But itâs like heâs got a Lamborghini with no license to drive. He contains all these multitudes within him, but, at the same time, has a tremendous amount of expectation on him from everyone around him who wants him to live his life on a symbolic, representational level, in order to prove whatever point they want. This kid is trying to negotiate the balance between âWho am I really?â and âWho do I have to be to make everyone around me happy and survive in America?â

How did you handle the meta consideration of finding the person of Luce without losing his symbolism?

KH: Iâve been telling this story that I grew up in New Orleans, the South, and went to a private school for high school. New Orleans is very laidback, weâve got a lot of slang, which is what it is. But then I went to this majority white school and was one of five, six, less than 10 black people in the entire high school. The first thing they told me was, âYou canât say âyeah.â Itâs âyes.ââ They were like, âWhat do your parents do? Why do you dress like that?â I started judging myself and changing who I was or what I looked like to assimilate to the culture. I took a lot of that and brought it into Luce and his journey coming from Eritrea, and to his parents saying, âWe donât know how to pronounce your name, so weâre changing it.â [laughs] And Harriet being like, âYou need to do these things in order to be great.â Itâs like [to her], âWhatever I am isnât enough for you. Youâre judging me based on where I came from, and now youâre telling my parents I wrote a violent paper.â Itâs insane.

Watching Luce, I wondered if heâs played as if the character is the way that he is at his core and the audience just gets to discover that, or if the events of the film goad him into becoming the way that he is. Did either of you make a decision to play it one way?

JO: As a director, I have a conception of the character, but I always believe that the actor has to live it truthfully. We talked a tremendous amount about where this guy was coming from and the specific biographical details of that. But, at the same time, the beauty of it is these moments that just appear as actors are living it. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Luce is in the shed with his friend, Orlicki, who says, âDeShaun is black black.â And Luce instantly tries to defuse the situation. For a moment, he retreats into himself, but right after, he smacks his friendâs leg, and they start laughing. It tells you so much about who this guy is, constantly measuring every moment, situation and expectation from people.

So, in terms of the overall of the character, thereâs that human part of him thatâs just a 17-year-old kid trying to figure out who he is like most 17-year-old kids are. But then thereâs a part of him thatâs brilliant and well read; heâs been brought out of a real, physical war zone and thrust into this psychological, emotional and sociological war zone of culture in America. Heâs taken some of the skills from survival there and applying it here, constantly reading everything around him looking for incoming fire, ducking and covering, reshaping and reforming himself as he navigates all of this. Thatâs where some of the symbolic version of this character comes from. He knows what he has to represent to literally survive.

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You mention incoming fire, and it reminds me that I read about how every time Luce shuts his locker, you added in the sound of gunfire. Where did that idea come from?

JO: A lot of people, and this started at the script level and in friends and family screenings, they would say things like, âIf we just had a flashback to when he was a child soldierâŠâ Which, to me, was like saying, âIf you just made it easier to pigeonhole this characterâŠâ The minute you start doing all that, they can say that this is some PTSD story. But when you see someone walking down the street, unless youâre Bruce Willis in Unbreakable, you canât touch them and flash back to learn what happened to them. All you have are your eyes and ears, and from there we make judgments about who people are. But, at the same time, I did want to suggest some of his history, so I said, âWhatâs a more sophisticated way to make you feel some of the pressure this kid is coming from without spelling it out?â And thatâs where I decided, âWhat if we embedded gunshots throughout the locker, but we changed the pitch of them throughout the movie?â And also, the bells in the hallway that he hears in the school get more pitched up. Slowly, over the course of the film, youâre feeling that pressure rising and donât even know it.

If people wanted a flashback, do you think they really wanted to feel pity for Luce that they didnât otherwise have an outlet for?

JO: For me, I think they want to be able to put him in a box, and we all have that tendency. We want to be able to explain away the things we donât understand, and that defies the purpose of asking the question. Once we make it easy for the audience, thereâs no point to tell the story.

I saw the film for the second time yesterday and found myself watching it like a courtroom drama, building cases for or against characters, looking for silver bullets that might explain themâŠ

JO: Thatâs great to hear.

âŠbut then I realized at some point that this way of viewing was leading me to look for some kind of coherent explanation. Luce is all this one way or Ms. Wilson is all that way, and that one silver bullet will explain who they are, which goes against exactly what the film wants us to think.

JO: Yeah, itâs not like some epiphany weâre stating here, but itâs not the way the world works. I feel like if weâre going to tell these stories, thereâs often a version of the storyâand Iâm not going to criticize any of these films. I understand why these stories are told, whether to give us hope or understanding or a sense of clarity. But, at a certain point, you have to ask when itâs disserving us. There arenât easy morals or digestible answers to hundreds, thousand-year-old questions of identity that are now really bubbling to the surface in this country. When you look at the headlines in this country, the more we continue to think thereâs an easy answer, the more weâre going to deal with these problems in a way that doesnât solve anything. I felt the only wayâand this started with J.C. [Lee]âs brilliant playâto talk about these things is to grapple with the fact that there isnât a silver bullet.

Thereâs such a push and pull between sincerity and deceit for the character of Luce. Itâs tempting, based on what we learn about him, to doubt the authenticity of any given moment. How did you all handle that dissonance that we experience?

KH: Truthfully? Because everything is to be played with the truth, itâs almost hard to keep track of the truth, even as Luce, of when heâs trying to get something that he needs or when heâs genuine. I wouldnât even know at a certain point because it was always being sincere. It all kind of blurs after a while.

JO: I think thatâs a really astute observation of it because, as a 17-year-old kid, you donât know all the time. Youâre just reacting and dealing with the fire of the world around you.

Thereâs a very ambiguous scene about midway through the film when Luce practices his speech before an empty auditorium. Are we meant to know what heâs thinking or how heâs feeling there? Did you make the determination of whether this is true self because heâs not performing before an audience, or just a rehearsal of emotion so he can play convincingly when the seats are full?

KH: I donât think we made that determination, did we?

JO: Not explicitly. We never talked about it on that level. I think whatâs so tricky and interesting with a character like this is that thereâs always going to be an internal emotional life. However, it ends up being projected in that specific moment is going to be up to the audience. Thatâs why I love hearing this interpretation of yours. But what I think is sincere is this 17-year-old boy feeling the suffocating pressure of all these expectations, and itâs almost even harder when thereâs nobody there in front of you because you realize what a performance it has to be. Whether thereâs somebody there or not, you have to be on all the time.

KH: Thereâs some truth to that. I can remember being in the moment, considering the series of events that led up to it with being the star pupil, seeing what happened to DeShaun and Stephanie, and then my black teacherâwho we talked about being in a weird way like a second momâgo behind my back and tell my white parents that maybe Iâm a threat because of who I was is a lot! And then to have my dad turn on me like that [snaps fingers] on the drop of a dime simply because he heard an accusation and be like, âThis is bullshit, youâre full of shit.â Itâs a lot. I think to go through the process of fighting for his identity and rights, in that moment heâs saying this thing about how his mother couldnât pronounce his name, so they renamed me, it hurts. Because it reminds him of the things heâs had to go through since the beginning that heâs had to suppress to move forward. Thereâs a lot of truth. Heâs disappointed, and he feels scared and abandoned. Heâs very alone in that moment, which you can see. But it could be performative because there are moments where heâs like, âIâm good at acting!â [laughs]

There are a pair of instances in the film where itâs alluded to that Luce showed cruelty to a fish. Is that at all a nod to the possibility that he might be a sociopath given that being a commonly recognized trait for them?

JO: Again, weâre just always trying to present things as truthfully as possible. Iâm sure every person in this room has done something as a kid to a living creature where youâre just testing the limits. I remember things with my dogs when I was six or seven like, âWhat if we fold the dogâs legs this way?â Youâre sort of playing, but youâre also testing your power. Down to holding the magnifying glass over ants, whatever the case might be. These are all things where we lay out the story and just tell it. Then itâs up to us as to how we want to view it. Do we want to view this as a child doing something or through the lens of race? His history coming from violence? And then how are we going to choose to feel about it afterwards.

Luce, both the film and the character, rail against the âmodel minorityâ archetype. But while he describes it as a straightjacket, is it possible that he also slyly sees it as a shield under which he can hide some of his actions?

KH: I think heâs aware of that. Thereâs a bit of not completely fully understanding the privilege he gets from his white parents. But at the same time, I do think he knows Principal Dan is like, âThis oneâs my thoroughbred. Heâs on my team, I know how to work him, I know how to get him on my side, I know if I bring my parents theyâll probably donate money to the school.â He can finesse his mother right before, and she might do exactly what he needs her to. But thereâs another part of him that doesnât know how much he can do. Heâs just testing it out. Heâs reactive, just living in the moment and seeing what heâs capable of.

JO: Whatâs interesting about him is his duality. Heâs grown up with a white family, adjacent to white privilege because he can walk into school with his mom and dad. They can offer him the kind of protection that DeShaun would never get. One of the things I would often tell Naomi and Octavia is, âImagine if that big showdown happens in the third act, but it was DeShaunâs parents who walked in.â Thereâs no way they could engage and carry themselves in the way Luceâs parents do! But at the same time, Luce is still black. When he walks out of his house, he will be treated and viewed when heâs not with his parents in the same way that a young black man would be. He alludes to that when it comes to smoking weed.

So, part of all this is how far the model-minority thing can go for Luce. How far does this privilege extend for him? How much can he get away with, or when are they going to decide that heâs not a saint anymore, but a monster? And the inability to negotiate that. Because in either case, whether youâre a saint or a monster, itâs saying that youâre not human. Though one of them comes with privileges, itâs still saying that you donât have access to a full spectrum of humanity. While on some level, everyone around Luce thinks that if they lift him up to perfection, it proves, one, how open-minded and progressive they are and, two, the system works. What they donât always fully recognize is that not only is it discarding the people who arenât doing that, itâs also creatingâon an emotional and psychological levelâan alienation within Luce. And, in this case, both people are hurt as opposed to arriving and doing the real work that makes it a possibility for everyone to have access to that full humanity.

You mention the big third-act showdown, and in both times Iâve seen Luce, the moment that gets the loudest gasp is when his adoptive white parents decide to go all in on a pretty bald-faced lie. What do you hope audiences take away about whiteness and its complicity in perpetuating the monster/saint dichotomy?

JO: An awareness of that complicity. Thereâs often the analogy used that fish donât know theyâre swimming in waterâ[the waterâs] just there. When you have a space thatâs built for your existence, you donât feel the pressure points in the same way. Youâre not always aware of the privileges you have and how those things can be weaponized. Sometimes, your good intentions can be a path that leads downâwe know how the rest of that saying goes. I think the challenge for everybody, and thatâs what I loved about telling this story, is that we are all limited and prisoners of our own perception. For some of us, that perception comes with more privilege. But specifically, for those who live on the top end of that power totem pole, there often isnât an awareness of how even in the best of circumstances, one is contributing to the systems of power and privilege that exist. I think, hopefully, if weâve done our job with the story, weâre not lecturing anybody or pointing the finger per se. Weâre just asking the question.

Watching it again, I was struck by how many instances in the film there are where if the characters were just honest, transparent, or didnât assume something about the other person, they could have avoided so many bad things. Is that a fair statement?

JO: Absolutely! I think we all knowâand this is my first time meeting you, Marshallâhow hard that is. It is so hard. Itâs such a negotiation between ego and beliefs. All you have to do is look at whoâs in power in this country right now and what he has the privilege to ignore. And then, by proxy, the people who choose to support him have the privilege to ignore. What was really interesting about Amyâs arc in the film is that you have her move from a lack of awareness to awareness, but then she has the privilege to decide how aware she wants to be or what she wants to turn off. She says, âYou know, I just want to love my son, forget it!â

JO: Tim and I often had these conversations about where Peterâs coming from. He came from more of a working-class background and rose to that level. But Amy grew up in the type of environment sheâs already in, with more privilege. Peter very much just wants to parent. Heâs always dealing with that, and this is where it gets so tricky with that negotiation of âwhen am I being a parent who just wants to look after my son? Or when am I being a white man whoâs letting my baggage of privilege and my perceptions and assumptions about my son cloud the way I treat him?â And thatâs where it becomes really messy and complicated.

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Gur Bentwichâs Peaches and Cream contains a running joke that resonated in the context of the 36th Jerusalem Film Festival. Bentwich follows a director named Zuri (played by Bentwich) who undergoes an odyssey after his new film, also called Peaches and Cream, has been indifferently received on its opening weekend. In various encounters, people tell Zuri that they prefer European to Israeli cinemaâclaims that feel ironic given the way that the lurid and feverish nature of Bentichâs film feels pointedly European and American in sensibility. Peaches and Creamâs wandering camera, eroticized women, and narcissistic macho anxiety suggests a Fellini production as viewed through the prism of contemporary American films like After Hours, Listen Up Philip, and Birdman, creating a friction. Zuri and Bentwichâthe two are deliberately indistinguishableâhave both made a quasi-European film only to be discounted for not being European enough for Israeli cinephiles.

I thought of Bentwichâs running joke when the international criticsâ delegation of which I was a partâand which also included writers from China, Poland, Lithuania, Portugal, Russia, and Slovakiaâwas treated to a dinner with a group of Israeli critics. Peaches and Cream came up in conversation, with one Israeli writer voicing his irritation with the filmâs references to Western cinema, the sort of fealty which he said was part of the problem of Israelâs cinematic exposure to the rest of the world. Western films reference one another, he said, creating an echo chamber that serves as an affirmation of legacy, while Israeli cinema tends to emulate not itself but the West as well. This writerâs sentiments echoed comments I heard at the Warsaw Film Festival last year, from critics and filmmakers from various countries.

Such conversations are reminders that pop culture is one of the Westâs great legacies and means of influence. (In Tel Aviv for a few days after leaving the festival, I noticed that every bar in my neighborhood played vintage American music, from Bob Dylan to the Talking Heads to Alice Cooper to the Notorious B.I.G.) Another joke in Peaches and Cream almost subliminally parodies the neuroses that such an attitude may inspire: Zuri fights to keep posters of his film up in public, trying to protect them from being obscured by other notices.

Relatedly, I saw a Peaches and Cream sticker that had been stuck on a large banner for Pedro AlmodĂłvarâs Pain and Glory, a hot-ticket item at the festival. The bannerâs commanding imageâof a tormented and gray-bearded Antonio Banderas, who won the best actor trophy at this yearâs Cannes for his performance, casting a shadow in the shape of AlmodĂłvar himself against a red backdropâhad been merged with an advertisement for Bentwichâs film, the round sticker providing Banderas with a makeshift eyepatch that cheekily embodied the very intersection between Israeli and international cinema that drives the JFF at large. The festival had one of the most eclectic lineups that Iâve seen, including vintage restorations, lurid thrillers, many Cannes entries, notable American films from last year, documentaries, shorts, and homegrown Israeli productions, which were often the most difficult to get into.

Generally, my fellow critics didnât care much for Peaches and Cream, finding it narcissistic and borderline sexistâqualities which struck me as part of the filmâs joke. Thereâs no way that an actor-director, other than maybe Kevin Costner, could give himself this many close-ups without a satirical intent. Peaches and Cream is a messy and unruly film, at least until the requisite redemption provided by the third act, and it indicates the Jerusalem Film Festivalâs taste for bold formalism. Most festivals open with a bland audience-pleaser, while the 36th edition of the festival kicked off with Bong Joon-hoâs Palme dâOr-winning Parasite, which is the very embodiment of confrontational political cinema.

Parasite initially suggests a South Korean cover of a Patricia Highsmith novel, with a family that literally lives under the surface of mainstream society conning its way into jobs with a wealthy household. In the filmâs first hour, the greatest achievement of Bongâs career to date, viewers are encouraged to enjoy the poor familyâs ruse, which the filmmaker renders with svelte long takes and pans that elucidate shifting modes of power while providing visceral visual pleasure. Bongâs kinetics are also a form of misdirection, as the filmâs tone gradually curdles, with the class resentment thatâs been percolating under the narrativeâs surface eventually exploding into a massacre that suggests a microcosm of both revolution and genocide. As always, Bong clinches his themes and symbolism too tightly, but Parasite is still a significant comeback from the exhaustingly broad Snowpiercer and Okja.

The setting of Parasiteâs premiere at the JFF intensified the filmâs power, as it was shown at the Sultanâs Pool, a striking outdoor amphitheater from which you can see the walls of the Old City, the Tower of David, and even, from certain angles, portions of Palestine. Now a legendary venue thatâs hosted the likes of Eric Clapton and Dire Straits, the Sultanâs Pool was a site for childrenâs sacrifices centuries earlier, before it was later modernized by Herod into a portion of Jerusalemâs water supply system. Before Parasiteâs premiere, there were many speeches testifying to Israelâs dedication to cinema, including an appearance by the countryâs president, Reuven Rivlin. This pageantry isnât without tension, given the conservative governmentâs hostility to films that are critical of authority, which was expressed by the audienceâs traditional booing of the Minister of Culture and Sport, Miri Regev, whoâs wanted to cut the governmentâs funding of the arts, and who appeared at the JFF this year via a pre-taped speech. Which is to say that, in a setting freighted with ghosts and nesting political tensions, in a city and country with as much cultural baggage as any in the world, a left-wing horror film like Parasite carries extra weight. It even feels a bit like a dare.

Film festivals can be a paradox. On one hand, theyâre the ideal of the world most artists and critics would like to live in, one where like-minded people share the experience of art, food, and drink as communion, though theyâre also dream realms that cast a potentially insidious illusion of rebellion, giving audiences a faux catharsis that enables the very repression that artists and critics are often railing against. Arenât festivals, regardless of the politics of the art they program, ultimately P.R. for governments that still do whatever they like? (Perhaps Regev either doesnât understand this possibility or is expertly playing her role as a liberal foil.) In such contexts, I think of Matrix Reloaded, in which the hero learns, in what must be one of the most convoluted speeches in the history of cinema, that heâs a tool for providing an appearance of hope and choice to a population thatâs still nevertheless controlled.

Yet it also feels unfair to single out the festival experience for this train of thought, as all artistic endeavors run the risk of rendering palatable the sources of their ireâa topic we also touched on at the criticsâ dinner. Art opens us up to other cultures and ideas, but it can also lull us into a kind of waking sleep, making us think weâve initiated change merely by going to a festival or watching a film or posting something critical on Facebook or Twitter. And this danger of art is especially material when one gorges on the fruits of creativity for days at a time. The act of sipping a drink and eating nice dishes before the Parasite premiere while surveying the Palestinian landscape does, for instance, carry a certain frisson. Many films playing at the festival were concerned with the legacy of Israel, particularly regarding Palestine, and the Israeli critics and press openly spoke of these ambiguities. Even casual exchanges with journalists and average filmgoers alike ended with some variation of a sentiment that arose as a recurring festival manta: âItâs complicated.â

The JFF seems intent on working within the system by using government funding as well as donations to both preserve and establish an Israeli cinematic canon, which it compares and contrasts with the cinema of the rest of the world. Many of the festivalâs screenings were held in the Jerusalem Cinematheque, which is located near the Sultanâs Pool and houses a film archive. The delegation was invited to take a tour of the archive, and in the labs we saw ravishing silent images of Jerusalem desert that have since been modernized as part of the city. We also spoke with people who are restoring films from Israel and other countries. Several restorations played at the festival, among them Amos Guttmanâs 1986 crime drama Bar 51 and Clemente Fracassiâs 1953 opera Aida, a stagey yet hypnotic Verdi adaptation featuring a gorgeous Sophia Loren and Technicolor that might make the artists of Hammer Films blush.

Color is used to florid and rapturous effect in another JFF selection, Karim AĂŻnouzâs The Invisible Life of EurĂ­dice GusmĂŁo. The film tells one of the oldest of melodramatic tales, following two sisters whoâre separated from one another in 1950s-era Brazil by a patriarchal system that fetishizes female obedience. EurĂ­dice (Carol Duarte) is an aspiring pianist, while her older sister, Guida (Julia Stockler), is a free spirit who runs off with a Greek sailor. Returning home single and pregnant, Guida is rejected by their father, Manuel (Antonio Fonseca), who calls her a slut and lies to each girl about the other in order to keep them apart. Itâs a ruse that will haunt the family for the rest of their lives.

Starting with the filmâs opening, a humid fantasy sequence in a tropical forest that serves as a metaphor for the girlsâ eventual plight, AĂŻnouz goes stylistically big, utilizing a swooping camera and a wrenching score to sweep us up in EurĂ­dice and Guidaâs longing for one another, which resembles romantic passion. This texture gives The Invisible Life of EurĂ­dice GusmĂŁo, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this yearâs Cannes, a streak of perversity thatâs amplified by the explosion of harlequin reds and blues that signify dwarfed desire. Though this film has an unimpeachably feminist sensibility, AĂŻnouz also evinces remarkable sympathy for Manuel, a square whoâs stymied by his devotion to a hypocritical culture. A shot of the man waiting for his âgoodâ daughter and her child in a restaurant, while the âbadâ daughter spies on them unseen, is among the most haunting images Iâve seen this year.

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Colors serve the story of AĂŻnouzâs film, while color is much of the story driving Diao Yinanâs The Wild Goose Lake, a Chinese gangster drama that grows increasingly hallucinatory as it somewhat moseys toward its climax. The narrative opens on a man with a past, Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge), as he meets a woman, Liu (Gwei Lun-mei), from the wrong side of the tracks. We soon learn that Zhou is waiting for a different woman, though Liu assures him of her loyalty. But the play of light and rain across these arresting faces is more commanding than this expositional business, with Diao soon splintering his plot into suggestive abstraction, as we learn how Zhou became a hunted man enmeshed in a war between crooks and law enforcers. The plot becomes so riven with betrayals and reversals that oneâs encouraged to digest the film as pure poetry, homing in on the explosive hues and stunning action scenes and foreboding shadows and, particularly, the pervading feeling of rootlessness and loss thatâs occasionally exacerbated by brutal violence. The Wild Goose Lake is a ballad of aggression and decay, relating a shaggy dog story thatâs truly a portrait of a country eating itself alive.

Color has a colder and more sinister purpose in two of the other thrillers I saw at JFF. In Vivarium, through sheer force of will and formalism, director Lorcan Finnegan makes a potentially trite premise eerie and suggestive. Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a couple looking to move in together, and on a whim they agree to look at a townhome in a yuppie neighborhood that theyâre sure theyâll despise. The neighborhood is revealed to represent corporate efficiency and impersonality to the ultimate degree, with identical, unforgettably hideous pea-green homes that suggest Monopoly pieces as arranged by the Tim Burton of Edward Scissorhands. The neighborhood is so generic, in fact, that Gemma and Tom get lost trying to leave, until itâs revealed that theyâre trapped here via supernatural means, and forced to raise a child (Senan Jennings) who suggests an ill-tempered robot, screaming at a glass-shattering pitch when he isnât fed on time.

Finnegan understands that to explain his premise too much is to dispel its power, and the vagueness of his narrative serves to place the audience in his protagonistsâ shoes. The filmmaker also doesnât over-emphasize the obvious thematic hook, which is that Gemma and Tomâs no-exit situation suggests a nightmarish version of the disappointment that can arise when people succumb to the social pressure to mate, procreate, and attain boring jobs in the name of respectability. As precisely made as Vivarium is, with irrational images that are worthy of classic horror cinema, itâs all concept. Gemma and Tom are merely sketches of the fear and ennui that arrive on the cusp of reaching middle age. The charactersâ immediate accommodation of their new hell feels truthful, but it also robs Vivarium of urgency. Once one accepts its message, which is clear early on, thereâs nowhere else for the film to go.

In certain fashions, Jessica Hausnerâs Little Joe is reminiscent of Vivarium, though itâs a richer and more unsettling work. Both films feature intensely symmetrical imagery and rich colors that suggest a mockery of the emotions that are being suppressed by the rigid settings. But thereâs more mystery and emotional variety in Little Joe; one canât quite pinpoint the meaning of Hausnerâs aesthetic flourishes, such as deliberately unmotivated dolly shots that cut characters out of certain frames in order to emphasize windows or other passageways. And why does a laboratory for breeding plants suggest a Wes Anderson set, with clothes that match the colors of certain pieces of furniture? This color scheme subliminally complements the plant that Alice (Emily Beech, who won the best actress prize at this yearâs Cannes for her performance) has bred. Her creation, which she calls âLittle Joeâ after her son, Joe (Kit Connor), is obscenely fake-looking, suggesting a combination of a rose and a penis. When the plant is stimulated by human talk, it opens up into full bloom, its bright red head serving to satiate the yearning emanating from Alice, a single mother, and her workaholic compatriots.

The plant is engineered to trigger happiness in humans, a concept that reveals how alien the notion of human interaction is to Alice, who rebuffs her poignantly worshipful colleague, Chris (Ben Whishaw). But Alice, a control freak, stymies the plant in a way that reflects her own alienation, rendering it incapable of reproducing. The plant strikes back, gifting human happiness at a price that steers Little Joe into Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory, leading to a brilliant joke: that Alice, in her self-absorption, canât see the invasion thatâs engulfing the world around her. At times, this stark, sad, weirdly exhilarating film also suggests David Cronenbergâs The Fly, similarly boiling a potentially sprawling plot down to a few settings and characters, evoking an aura of clammy claustrophobia. Cronenbergâs film ended with an operatic crescendo, however, while Hausner keeps us trapped in her hermetic world, in which a plant teaches humans to abandon the possibility of ecstasy.

At the JFF, I missed Yolande Zaubermanâs much-buzzed-about M, a documentary about the child abuse thatâs wrought in an Orthodox Jewish community, due to considerable demand. I did, though, catch a few documentaries that should earn attention outside of the festival circuit. Ai Weiweiâs The Rest continues the artistâs project of exposing the refugee crisis in Europe, in which countries like France, Turkey, and Greece fight over where to store people whoâre fleeing from endless wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and others. Thematically and aesthetically, the film is similar to Ai Weiweiâs Human Flow, though the filmmaker has compressed his footage here, editing The Rest down to 79 minutesâ worth of tactile physical gestures that bring home the reality of the refugeesâ lives, divorcing the topic of platitude. We see refugees burning plastic water bottles to start a fire for warmth, people cradling a cat deep into their chest, and, most wrenchingly, Ai Weiwei captures a government destroying a shanty village with a bulldozer, a sequence the filmmaker shoots with a matter-of-factness thatâs unflinching and unforgettably moving. Most importantly, Ai Weiwei reminds us of a harsh reality: Most of the refugees merely want to return to their war-torn countries, willing to risk death over the abuse and contempt that awaits them throughout the rest of the world.

Interview: Rick Alverson on The Mountain and Challenging Narrative Convention

Writer-director Rick Alverson is as intense and intelligent as films like The Comedy, Entertainment, and the forthcoming The Mountain would lead you to believe, with a pointed distrust of sentiment that indicates an urge to forge a connection that isnât muddied by platitude. Alversonâs protagonists yearn for connection, too, especially Tye Sheridanâs wounded and adrift young man in The Mountain, a pursuit that also mirrors the filmmakerâs urge to discard or challenge narrative convention in order to reach a kind of purity of observation. The Mountain is rich in self-consciously still and idyllic compositions that parody the charactersâ various pretenses, while also capturing their internal reverberations.

Since at least the rise of postmodernism, artists and critics alike have been trying to free certain art formsâparticularly the novel and later cinemaâof the constrictions of plot, presumably to access a free-associative and primordial truth. This struggle was at the heart of Susan Sontagâs essay collection Against Interpretation, and itâs a concern shared by Alverson. Yet the filmmaker, in his art and in conversation, runs into the same irony as Sontag: Their rejection of interpretation, embodied mostly in Alversonâs case by the rejection of plot, is interpretation. Most critics and artists, even if they confine themselves to discussions of formalism (and Alverson and I did not) still run headfirst into ideas of meaning, which could be more prosaically and perhaps more truthfully be described as notions of theme.

However, itâs refreshing that Alverson even bothers to grapple with such paradoxes, and he has a knack for speaking in full and winding sentences that mirror the thorny poetry of his cinema. Alverson and I also happen to live in the same cityâRichmond, Virginiaâand we met last week over coffee in a local spot and chewed over The Mountain, Alversonâs earlier work, and his antipathy toward the mass machine of modern pop culture.

Given that you travel quite a bit, is it comforting to have a central home to return to?

âComfortâ is a complex word. [laughs]

I know. I think Iâm asking if the concept of a nest appeals to you.

Yeah, but thereâs always acclimating to coming home. Thereâs this whole process of reevaluating things around you that have been with you for a quarter century. But, yeah, itâs nice being in a city thatâs oblique and a little removed from the hustle and bustle of the industry obsessions. Now, if I can clean up my Twitter feed to reflect the world as opposed to the film industry, Iâll be a better person.

My Twitter game is extremely rudimentary. A variety of passing fancies.

Yeah.

Where did you go to film The Mountain? California?

It was shot in upstate New York, from the Seneca in the Finger Lakes to the Bronxâ14 different towns. Then we took the production and did a leg out in the Pacific Northwest. Mount Baker and the Canadian border all the way through the rain forest. A company move across the country is substantial. [laughs]

Do you purposefully seek narratives in which characters are wandering?

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Yeah, Iâm sort of turned off by certainty in films. Movies that have always meant something to me are open and unmoored. The idea of resolution is so fantastical. In so much of consumer cinema, resolution is pushed as a necessary element. Not only as a cathartic moment in the last act, but the very nature in every journey in most films feels like itâs destined to be resolved. Itâs so uninteresting to me. Itâs so removed from the way we experience life.

When watching The Mountain and Entertainment, I thought at certain points that itâs a relief to be free of exposition. That opens films up, gives them space to do and say something else. Your characters donât talk about a plot. Iâm not saying that those films donât have narratives, but your characters are allowed to say these poetic and surprising things because they are accorded both geographic and emotional space.

Yeah, in the consumer model for cinema, there isnât that air in the thing. The act of âtightening it upââfrom the script reviews to the test audiencesâkills a thing and deprives it of its incoherence, which is poetry, the stuff of life. Also, I never like as a viewer to feel that Iâm being coddled. I love the act of discovery. The act of curiosity. The reason so many films are so boring to me is because itâs all laid out; thereâs no place to maneuver in there. Youâre supposed to be a passive subject that watches the thing live and find you and actually becomes your consciousness, because these movies arenât giving your mind anything to do.

I think of the moment in The Mountain where the father tells his son, Andy, the Tye Sheridan character, that he never thought the boy would stop growing. And then he compares his son to the childâs mother, seemingly unflatteringly. Thereâs a lot of texture there in just a few lines. A conventional film might have elaborated more on the psychology, though we donât need it. And those lines haunt the entire movie.

Well, good, I appreciate that. A lot of audiences are conditioned to let those things pass them by, because movies teach them to look for expositional triggers. Like âwhat is this telling me, does it make sense?ââand if it doesnât they discard it. Theyâre conditioned in films and episodic television to do that. Itâs literally a grammar that says âthis is the particular kind of information thatâs going to be valuable to you to be able to compartmentalize this whole thing when youâre done.â I think weâre being deprived of a lot of the stuff of life in these grammars.

Even in art cinema, thereâs this narrative fixation, and The Mountain looks at this quite a lot, both as a toxic element for these men in this film, and for the audience thatâs imbibing them. Is narrative, in the space of cinema, still functional? Even in a broader space, has narrative outlived its functionality as a delivery mechanism for complexity? Weâre increasingly taught to have caches, and to reduce things down to very simple narrative ideas, and thatâs weaponized by your Trumps and by everybody. The larger concern isnât âOh we should just tell more positive and better stories.â Weâre using something that was designed in the oral tradition, and in the written tradition, for an entirely other space. Can we criticize the rules of the game?

I donât want to put The Mountain in a box myself, but Jeff Goldblumâs character, Wallace, is himself addicted to a narrative, to an idea of how lobotomies work.

Thatâs a reduction of the complexity and nuance of his life into a tidy narrative bubble, essentially. That then allows for a hell of a lot of misfortune, because heâs succumbing to ignorance, and ignorance breeds that shit.

Andy, maybe like his mother, refutes ideas of how we should behave, and you wonder if theyâre actually wrestling with madness. From what you give us lobotomizing Andy feels disproportionate to his actions, which is terrifying. We see the social bridge: Heâs on the bench entirely accepted and a moment later heâs at societyâs mercy.

Itâs about surfaces, signifiers, and clarity. I hope the film looks at problems of clarity. We often speak of clarity in celebratory terms, but what is lost in that? The whole mission statement of the arts is to interrupt that idea somehow.

A scene that struck me in The Mountain, and that testifies to the benefits of how you work, making the audience come to you to a certain extent, is when Andy grasps the face of one of Wallaceâs patients.

Yeah, I like that scene a lot.

Itâs a profound moment. Youâre thinking about the potential similarity of this woman to Andyâs mother, and what Andy thinks about that, and his desire for communion. It is poetryâa pure moment. Itâs not emotion-by-the-yard, like in a more conventional narrative, with waves of catharses. This is a moment where youâre in this room and you have to look at these people. It reminds me a little bit of Bresson. He slows your biorhythms down, and when certain moments come they hit you in the solar plexus.

Itâs funny with Bresson, you, and particularly a contemporary audience, have to be receptive to that state. And there are treasures in there, you know. I think about emotion and the capacity for cinema or whatâs left of it to viscerally engage with you emotionally. The emotions that we typically experience in cinema are nostalgic and reverential. Iâm not a fan of Tarantino because heâs very tightly recirculating something, and thereâs no air in it. I understand heâs a great craftsman, but thatâs not why I go to cinema. This idea of âoh this reminds me of this and now Iâm reminded in the vein of nostalgia for this emotionââitâs all triggering. And when the uncertain events of a natural experience, uncoupled with another experience, occurs to an audience, they just shut it out because it makes them uncomfortable. If your mission statement is to engineer that discomfort, it can be tricky.

I watched your first film, The Builder, last night for the first time. Itâs very good.

It was a petri dish. Me shooting and, at any given time, one other person holding a boom mic, that was the extent of the crew for a year. It was an investigation into the relevance of the medium to me.

The Builder is shaggier visually than your recent films, but your aesthetic seems to be pretty fully formed. You seem to have already known what kind of filmmaker you wanted to be. Is that fair or off-key?

Yeah, I donât believe we change very much as individuals in our lives. [laughs] We have a bandwidth, which is another reason why Iâve been forced to value limitations. Because the fact of the matter is that if we can better understand what that bandwidth is, we can explore it. One of my favorite writers is the novelist Thomas Bernhard, and every one of his books resemble one another. They have surrogates for the same position and value of characters in previous books, and so thereâs this tonal exploration of a very small space over the course of many novels. I think thereâs something beautiful about that.

It seems to me that most major artists have one idea that theyâre seeking to express purely. They seem to be chasing a purity of expression.

Well, expression is a vocalization, and the process of cinema is still complex. Itâs cumbersome itâs so complex, down to the distribution, and the promotion and development, and the number of people and orientations that are involved. Itâs not tidy, but in that process thereâs a potential wrestling with the medium itself, which I think is really vital. And if independent cinema has anything to offer, itâs in that contention with the shape and limitations of the medium, rather than it all being a well-oiled machine that you step into. I envy those directors who have that opportunity to create such enterprises. At the same time, itâs reflexive contention that has value.

Did the wide recognition of The Comedy place any pressure on you to try to broaden your audience, or did it enable you to further mine your own interests?

It did allow me to expand in terms of budget, and so the movies became less scrappy. Fortunately. Thereâre scenes in Entertainment that I couldnât have shot on those earlier budgets. With any sort of mild recognition in a practitionerâs life, there are doors that open and people say, âOh, step in, weâve been waiting for you.â

How do you like to talk to actors? Are you someone who talks a lot to them?

I think there are actors with very particular curiosities that want to work with me, because itâs imperative that the person wrestle a little bit with the process, and that we go into that together and that thereâs a discovery. Iâm very physical, oriented toward physical concerns of the production, blocking, compositionâthose sorts of things. And, in casting, there are conversations about the objectives, so that motivesânot the characterâs motivations but our motivations as creatorsâare somewhat in concert. Thereâs a lot I donât tell because itâs not necessary. During a filmâs release or even a year afterward, an actor might discover something in it and ask me if it was intentional. Theyâll discover something about how they were used.

Jeff Goldblum is extraordinary in The Mountain.

He should get a best supporting actor Oscar nomination for it. He honestly should.

He should. Iâve always liked him. Iâm a very big fan of The Fly.

Yeah, Iâm a Cronenberg fan. I love The Brood. I wish Jeff had played one of the diminutive personalities in that. [both laugh]

Goldblumâs energy in this film has a robustness that contrasts with the withdrawn mood of the other characters, and with the austerity of the film in general.

Heâs incredibly curious as an individual and an artist. And his charisma has a life of its own. Heâs great to work with and is a very kind person, and inevitably some of that comes across in the film.

This next question is motivated by that scene we discussed earlier, when Andy is looking at this woman and caressing her face: Are you minutely advising the physical gestures of the actors? Their movements feel very exact.

Yes. Me and my cinematographer, Lorenzo Hagerman, who I did Entertainment with, designed this movie to be formal to a fault. Itâs supposed to almost verge on the fastidious, with a kind of compulsive artificiality. Itâs supposed to feel stilted. So, yeah, itâs rigorously blocked, even on a short production schedule. We donât do a lot of rehearsals, but there are blocking rehearsals and those are, to me, also gestural. I also talk about physical components, and will give direction like âpart your lips.â Itâs nice to work with people who recognize our limitations of access to this two-dimensional space. First of all, thereâs no interior beyond the screen. It literally is a flat expanse, in which youâre generating the illusion of access, which is really just an event that is occurring in the audience. Someone like Bresson proves that itâs silly to believe that an emotional event canât be generated entirely on the surfaces, though itâs not where we typically look for it.

Do your actors ever resist this sort of direction?

Some, but not who I work with. Nobody has for a long time.

The Mountain reminded me a bit of The Master. Do you admire that movie?

I thought it had problems. I mean, I admire everybody involved in it. Paul Thomas Anderson is the last great steward of a dying part of the industry, heâs an astute craftsman with a conscience and a capacity for nuance that Tarantino doesnât have. I donât know. I can understand that they have some literal similarities: thereâs a photographer in that film, and thereâs this concept of a mentor. Iâm fascinated with these huckster characters, and so is Goldblum, and we bonded over that. Essentially our nation was forged by entrepreneurial fraudulence, even if youâre going back to the entirety of the new world. Whatâs being searched for is a fantastical unreality, and that desire is harnessed by industry whether itâs the Virginia Company or Joseph Smithâs enterprises. I find these characters incredibly fascinating, and I think Paul Thomas Anderson has a mutual fixation with that. Of course, the two films were being made during the same time period.

To return to a familiar theme of this conversation, neither you nor Anderson are cowed by the idea of offering resolution. Youâre both determined to forge your own paths, and you both follow your characters into the ether.

Heâs more generous than I am. [both laugh]

He might be more of a humanist, though I wouldnât call you ungenerous. Thereâs a lot of earnest searching in your films.

I feel deeply about people and their environments and frailties. Iâm sometimes painted as a cynic or a contrarian.

Iâve heard that too, and I think thatâs a misreading of your work.

I appreciate that. Thereâs this fella, I forget who, who said it was evident that I hate the medium, and that I hate humanity. Just because youâre trying to interrupt this greased conduit into self-absorption and validation, just because youâre trying to provide an obstacle. I believe that obstacle is constructive, and I want to become more alive and less pacified. Some critics get kind of personal about me and Iâm like âChrist Almighty you donât even know me.â What did Francis Bacon get for Godâs sake, you know? Talk about obstinate.

Yeah, in Entertainment, I think your refusal to judge or editorialize that central character is humanistic. I think a lot of directors wouldâve scored points off that character.

Well, yeah, and I got shit for The Comedy because there was no on-screen reckoning. The author didnât imprint his morality on the thing and therefore the author is immoral. Thatâs tiredly outmoded. Itâs like postmodernism never happened.

Contemporary moralism is often at war with empathy anyway. If you have this tidy moral point, you arenât dealing with the characters, youâre dealing with the authorâs preconceived intentions.

Yeah, thereâs a lot of maneuvering for comfort, which I think is part of the reason why the medium is changing and some factions of it are dying. The works of someone like Bresson or Godardâalthough Godardâs work is the most experimental itâs ever been, and God bless Kino for releasing his films in the United Statesâare now mostly relegated to the museum set. When people wrestle with the form or the medium now, I would say that itâs strange that itâs not more welcomed in the critical community, since critics romanticize iconoclasts like the French New Wave directors.

Revolution looks better in retrospect, because we know the ending.

Yeah. [laughs]

And before we go, Iâd just like to say, for all the seriousness of your movies, thereâs certainly a dollop of absurdism.

Oh, yeah, totally. And had The Mountain been less of a difficult process to make, I wouldâve had a lot more fun. Iâve been watching the recent Bruno Dumont movies. With the Quinquin and Coincoin series, itâs fascinating to see how he weaponizes absurdist slapstick in order to have the audience become vulnerable, only to then have those characters moments later become grotesque bigots. Thatâs exactly what I was aiming for in The Comedy: to disarm some faction of the audience so they become complicit in the thing, and so that I become complicit too. A morality tale is uninteresting if itâs merely allowing you to shore up your moral voice.

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The Odessa International Film Festival feels very much on the rise, both as an international industry shindig and a well-funded driver for cultural tourism. Free open-air screenings on the Potemkin Stairs ensured a broad public audience; festival branding adorned buildings all over the gently chaotic city center; a modest film market attracted buyers and sales agents from across Europe; and this yearâs guests of honor included Mike Leigh, Catherine Denueve, and Rose McGowan. And yet, in the absence of any significant world premieres, the midsummer event seems to serve largely as a chance for local cinephiles to catch up with highlights from more venerable recent European festivals.

I was particularly struck by three titles, relatively fresh from the Cannes Film Festival, each of which takes a distinctive approach to depicting a family unit under duress. The 10th edition of Odessa IFF opened with Nicolas Bedosâs La Belle Epoque, a crowd-pleasing comedy about a stale long-term relationship and the cultural impact of the digital revolution. Daniel Auteuil stars as Victor, an aging bourgeois Parisian who sees himself as a victim of technological advances: The slow death of print media has put an end to his lucrative job as a newspaper cartoonist, while his wife, Marianne (Fanny Ardant), has taken to donning a VR headset at bedtime to distract herself from the monotony of their passionless marriage.

Victor, however, is offered a shot at regaining his joie de vivre by his sonâs friend, Antoine (Guillaume Canet), a screenwriter whoâs amassed a fortune devising personalized interactive theater productions that allow wealthy clients to live out their historical fantasiesâthink Westworld staffed by temperamental actors rather than malevolent robots. For reasons that arenât immediately apparent to the audience, Antoine owes Victor a debt of gratitude, and so offers the older man his first âexperienceâ on the house. A sentimental soul at heart, Victor elects to relive the day he first met Marianne in a bohemian Lyon bar in 1974. Perhaps inevitably, he swiftly falls for Margot (Doria Tillier), the actress hired to play the young Marianne, who also happens to be Antoineâs on-and-off-again girlfriend.

La Belle Epoque sustains a compellingly off-kilter tone, bouncing viewers disorientingly between the real world and Antoineâs elaborate soundstages. One sequence, in which Victor and Margot escape the set of a weed-fueled â70s house party and find themselves in a painstaking reconstruction of Nazi Germany, feels decidedly Charlie Kaufman-esque. And yet the film never fully succumbs to whimsy, as Victorâs nostalgia trip ultimately proves deeply poignant, while the depiction of Antoine and Margotâs dysfunctional relationship introduces a darker view of romance. And while the gags and social commentary are often a little broad, Bedos admirably refuses to hold the viewerâs hand as the intricate plot unfolds, paving the way for several immensely satisfying moments as the puzzle pieces finally slot together.

Ken Loachâs bruising 2016 drama I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme dâOr at Cannes, tapped into mounting Brexit anxiety and anti-Tory sentiment to become both the directorâs highest-grossing film in the U.K. to date and the subject of heated parliamentary debate over its damning portrayal of Britainâs broken welfare system. Sorry We Missed You sees the octogenarian filmmaker reteam with screenwriter Paul Laverty to deliver another timely, compassionate account of working-class life in North East England.

This time around, the focus is on a nuclear family suffering immensely as a consequence of the gig economy. Former builder Ricky (Kris Hitchen) has struggled to maintain a steady income since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and thus jumps hastily at the chance to sign a zero-hour contract as a delivery driver. What seems like a valuable opportunity to quickly accumulate cash soon begins to resemble a Kafkaesque nightmare, with humorless traffic wardens, obstinate customers, opportunistic thieves and a thuggish depot manager (Ross Brewster) conspiring to make Rickyâs work life borderline unbearable.

Things arenât much better for his wife, Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), a benevolent contract nurse with neither the time nor the resources to adequately care for her elderly patients. Adding insult to injury, the coupleâs taciturn teenage son, Seb (Rhys Stone), seems intent on punishing Ricky for his failings. And to cap it all off, Sebâs sensitive younger sister, Liza Jane (Katie Proctor), has started wetting the bed in response to this domestic disharmony.

In some regards, Sorry We Missed You is an even angrier, more urgent film than I, Daniel Blake. Scenes depicting Rickyâs delivery runs are mini master classes in stomach-churning tension, which hammer home the appalling precariousness of his existence. However, Loach offsets the mounting misery with moments of warmth. A sequence in which the family resolve to make the most of a rare evening together is particularly moving, and serves to make the bitter feuds that inevitably follow all the more heart-wrenching.

By and large, Sorry We Missed You is a little rough around the edges, as some of Rickyâs interactions with customers feel stilted and contrived, while Rhys Stone struggles to convey a convincing sense of Sebâs inner life. And yet, as a tirade against modern Britainâs obscene social inequality, Loachâs latest is undeniably propulsive and persuasive.

Shahrbanoo Sadatâs warmly received 2016 debut Wolf and Sheep tells a mildly fantastical tale of childhood in 1980s rural Afghanistan, centered partly around a boy named Quodrat (Qodratollah Qadiri). The Orphanage continues Quodratâs story, catching up with him as a teenage orphan living on the streets of Kabul. After heâs caught by police selling cinema tickets on the black market, heâs sent to a Soviet-funded orphanage where bullying is widespread. The boy swiftly learns that heâll need to form strong allegiances in order to keep his head above water, and thus he sets about building his own family unit.

For a large stretch, this is an enjoyable, if generic, coming-of-age drama, heightened chiefly by the novelty of its setting; Afghanistanâs brief period as a secular Soviet ally is a fascinating, oft-overlooked footnote in the countryâs turbulent modern history. But the film really comes to life thanks to a smattering of charmingly shambolic Bollywood-style musical numbers, employed to offer insight into the withdrawn Quodratâs desires and fears. Those paying close attention to the timeline may be anxious to learn what role the mujahideen, the Islamist guerilla groups committed to ending the Democratic Republic, might have to play in the narrative. Sadatâs bold decision to answer this question with a bombastic musical-action set piece pays off handsomely, bringing The Orphanage to an achingly bittersweet conclusion.

All of Quentin Tarantinoâs Movies Ranked

Quentin Tarantinoâs commitment to fortifying the themes of Once Upon a TimeâŠin Hollywood with layers of self-reflexivity, while still anchoring its concepts to fully realized, emotionally invested characters, makes the film one of his greatestâa dense but focused effort that validates the divisive artistâs status as one of American cinemaâs preeminent pop-cultural figures. The film navigates late-â60s Hollywood, an immersive playground of opulence and iconicity, alongside Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a fading star of TV westerns trying to break into the movies, and his best friend and longtime stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), before then jumping six months ahead to take the temperature of Hollywood on the eve of the Charles Manson murders. As the landscape and the sociocultural identity of Hollywood continue to change, Once Upon a TimeâŠin Hollywood takes on an elegiac quality, with Dalton and Booth returning to L.A. from a sojourn to Europe and a pregnant Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) preparing her home for the arrival of her baby boy.

The flash and fun of the filmâs first half gives way to a haunting decline into the valley of alcoholism, and to increasing signs that a new generation is about to push the old one out. And, then, inevitably, those tensions come to a head one August night on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills. We wonât spoil the ending here, but we will tell you below where Once Upon a TimeâŠin Hollywood falls on our ranked list of Tarantinoâs features. Sam C. Mac

10. Death Proof (2007)

With his hair combed in a flashy pompadour and a white scar running down his cheek, Kurt Russell plays evil Stuntman Mike as a swaggering, folksy raconteur. Even in the universe of Tarantino, which suggests a self-contained and increasingly self-referential cinephileâs mixtape of the countless films heâs absorbed throughout his life, Russell feels like a living, breathing human being. By comparison, Mikeâs victims simply suggest regurgitating pop-culture sponges. Indeed, by the time Mike comes after them in his skull-painted hellmobile, we connect more to the graphic image of the stunningly crafted gore than we do to the loss of life. When the female characters turn into avenging angels, their motivations seem to turn on a dime. Their attitude toward life and death, whether it be their own (âIâm okay!â one of them happily beams right after sheâs almost been decimated by Mikeâs muscle car) or Mikeâs, is so casually flippant that weâre denied that sense of righteous rage. Maybe itâs a joke on those old drive-in movies, which never gave much thought to life or death either, but somehow the reverent self-referential quality of Death Proof is more offensive than those old grindhouse filmmakers who were in it simply to make a buck. Jeremiah Kipp

8. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

Even when he isnât at the top of his artistic game, Tarantino, like Jean-Luc Godard, is talented enough that he doesnât put this kind of spot-the-references playfulness front and center in his films: Tarantino always provides us with some kind of plot or emotional context in which such referencesâand in a QT film, theyâre legionâmean something to viewers other than the fact that theyâre referencing something. In other words, you donât have to know a great deal about the martial arts genre to enjoy the sheer kinetic energy of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 any more than you have to know about the various crime thrillers Godard references in order to enjoy Breathless or Band of Outsiders. It might enhance oneâs appreciation of those films more, but thereâs more to them than just showing off how encyclopedic their movie knowledge is. Although Tarantinoâs films sometimes make recognitions toward real-world hurt and pain, they almost invariably take place in a movie-induced fantasy world, one that takes no part in political discourse and prefers instead to wallow in the detritus of popular culture and movie historyâentertainment, in other words. Kenji Fujishima

7. The Hateful Eight (2015)

Rather than following a clean genealogical path back to Hollywood westerns of the Golden Age, The Hateful Eight often resembles Italian giallo horror, less for that subgenreâs tendency to luxuriate in synth scores and extravagant lighting setups than for its less-celebrated preoccupation with cruelty and pain. As in those extravagant and supernaturally tinged slashers, characters in The Hateful Eight who choose to have any agency apart from maintaining a cover story find a nebulous reward for forcing fateâs hand. When the gun smoke clears, we somehow end up with more dead bodies than we had living ones at the start, and the film proves to have quite a lot in common with John Carpenterâs The Thing, apart from having the same lead actor (Kurt Russell) and largely identical blizzard conditions: Death emerges from the floorboards, and, following a crisis, an impromptu âcourtâ is established to distinguish between friend and foe. Even the final moments echo the creature classic: Having dispensed justice at long last, two doomed men share a laugh over a great lie, and the camera retreats upward and away from their near-lifeless detente. The haberdashery, by design a sanctuary, has been transformed into a self-cleaning oven, now strewn with an assortment of particulate matter, and we arrive at an unexpected Reservoir Dogs callback: a vetting of moral arithmetic that leaves no survivors. Jaime N. Christley

6. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)

From a structural standpoint, Kill Billâs two volumes connect us to serial cinema past, specifically the two-part films of Fritz Lang. Itâs a mess at times, but a seemingly intentional and glorious one. Certainly, Tarantinoâs greatest skills are literary and his numerous digressions recall the stylistic flourishes of Thomas Pynchon. When Tarantino abandons the Bride (Uma Thurman) in her premature burial deathtrap to focus on an extended flashback of her martial arts training, itâs reminiscent of Pynchonâs nine-page aside in Gravityâs Rainbow, which details the biography of a light bulb named Byron. If that comparison makes Kill Bill sound like so much compulsive masturbation, rest assured that Tarantino has a point. Consider the movieâs two volumes as yin and yang: The first installment, focusing primarily on the Bride, corresponds to the Chinese principle of darkness, negativity, and femininity, while the second, with a tone heavily influenced by the charming and seductive Bill (David Carradine), corresponds to the opposing principle of light, heat, motivation, and masculinity. Tarantino revels in the filmic power of verbal and (meta)physical pas de deux, and itâs in the final section of the second part, detailing the Bride and Billâs surprising confrontation, that the entire enterprise reveals its profoundly mortal (and moral) soul. Keith Uhlich

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At first glance, Odessa recalls the Algeria of the 1980s as described by playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, a place where local âcurrency has no value and there is nothing to buy anyway.â Odessa seems coy about offering a fantasy version of itself to those who arenât already confined to it and to whom displaying the cityâin the shape of superfluous possessions or souvenirsâwould amount to a perverse redundancy. Itâs a city coherent to the brutal honesty of its human faces, a city virtually without store windows to hawk unessential goods to passersbyâunless one traverses its center, where a McDonaldâs and a Reebok shop appear as reminders of a glossier elsewhere. Perhaps the way Cameroon, as one Cameroonian once told me, is a country without sidewalks, âunless you go to Douala.â This is, of course, a respite from the capitalist assaults of places where to experience the city is to stack up on its mementos. Itâs this context that made the Odessa International Film Festival (OIFF) feel like a long-awaited apparition in a place where events of its magnitude might be scarce.

The Cossacks was a fascinating selection to screen at the Potemkin Stairs because it wrapped a critique of normativity in some of the most sexist of cinematic languages, female ass shots as gags and all, making it hard to know what kind of selective reading of the film the audience might be making. The men on the screen are always either accosting, harassing, molesting, or trying to rape Maryana, which might be what triggered Rose McGowan, one of the festivalâs celebrity guests, to leave just a few minutes into the screening.

As much as watching a film such as George Hill and Clarence Brownâs silent drama at the place where one of cinemaâs most iconic sequences was shot feels like the crossing off of a bucket-list item we didnât realize was on that list until we experienced it, the off-screen drama was just as enticing. There was, for instance, the blatant spectacle of Ukrainian income inequality with âthe peopleâ huddled up on the uncomfortable steps for two hours eager to engage with a silent film while Ukrainian socialites decked out in animal prints treated the event more like a vernissage. There was also the impossible quest for a public bathroom mid-screening. This involved walking into a half-closed market across from the Potemkin Stairs and interrupting a loud quarrel between a mother and her adult son, who worked at one of the market stalls.

Itâs difficult to guess where queerness goes in Odessa. Maybe it only lives as disavowal, as in The Cossacks, which ends with Lukashka, after anointing his masculinity by slaughtering 10 Turks, stating to Maryana heterosexualityâs mathematical logic in its simplest form: âI am your man. You are my woman. I want you.â And the anointing is never final, the film seems to say. Indeed, as his father lies dying in his arms, Lukashka asks him: âFather, am I Cossack?â The question of where queerness might live, in this context, would be finally answered a few days later when I visit the only gay club in Odessa, Libertin, and meet a trans woman name Jalala, who confides that thereâs a âplaceâ in Odessa where straight men can go to to have sex with women like her. âIs it an app?â I ask. Jalala smiles and says that itâs a park. âBut itâs dangerous,â she tells me. âItâs very exciting and very dangerous.â Because there are skinheads, she says. âDo the skinheads want to kill you or fuck you, or fuck you and then kill you?â I ask her. âI donât know,â she responded. âThatâs why itâs dangerous.â

The festival main grounds, in front of the majestic Odessa Academic Theatre of Musical Comedy, arenât unlike Londonâs Southbank Centre in the early days of summer, where visitors and locals are both sold the idea that the city is this fun all year long. The atmosphere is cosmopolitan, with Nina Simone remixes or early Erykah Badu playing in the background, food trucks, a Mastercard stall, and outdoor sitting poufs. Thereâs also no stress in the air, no suffocating crowds, and as such no anxiety about being turned away from a screening.

When looking at the festivalâs program, one may scoff at the apparent lack of diversity and, more specifically, queerness. After a few screenings, though, one may get the sense that queerness does live at the Odessa International Film Festival and, per Jalalaâs account, in Odessa more generallyâit just isnât publicized. In Queen of Hearts, for instance, director May el-Toukhy takes the age-old narrative of the stranger who turns up to disrupt domestic bliss, or ennui, and gives it a daring incestuous twist. Anne (Trine Dyrholm) and Peter (Magnus Krepper) live an idyllic life in a mansion somewhere in Denmark with two young, and creepily angelic, twin daughters (Liv and Silja EsmĂ„r Dannemann). Thereâs something eerie about this setup even before Peterâs problematic teenage son, Gustav (Gustav Lindh), from another marriage is shipped from Sweden to live with his dad and unsettle everything.

Whatâs uncanny about Anne and Peterâs home is, of course, the way it gleams a kind of speckless completion of the heterosexual project, which could only ever be possible as a mirage. Theirs is the home of dreams bound to become nightmares by the introduction of even the most vaguely foreign element. Such as reality, that most irksome of registers, or a long-lost son. The house of Queen of Hearts, whose drama is so latent youâd only have to snap your fingers for chaos to erupt, evokes the house of Bong Joon-hoâs Parasite, the kind of immaculate luxury that could only be sitting on top of some macabre bunker full of roaches and well-fed zombies. The drama that links these homes is the notion that the epitome of the heterosexual family bliss borders its very obliteration, with the unruly resurfacing of all the gunk that had been swept underneath, as the very foundation for its habitat.

When Gustav arrives, then, and ends up having an affair with his stepmom, a trench coat-wearing lawyer for young victims of sexual abuse, weâre only surprised at how careless they seem to be about being found out. El-Toukhy is smart to avoid sensationalizing the taboo-breaking premise of the narrative with a camera that sides with Anne: her sexual hunger, her contradictions, her stretch marks. This isnât a film about roundabout incest, but one about the impossibility of satisfaction even for the most privileged woman, one with a high-powered and socially engaged job, money to spare, and a mansion by the lake in a Scandinavian country.

Queen of Hearts focuses on Anneâs paradoxes: Sheâs a savior and a monster, a middle-aged mother and a horny teenager, unabashedly exposing the inconvenient pores that remain underneath even the most beautifully made-up Nordic skin. And the film is about skin, ultimately. In the way Anne and Gustav have raw sex and the marks on Anneâs stomach are filmed with purpose, sincerity, and no apology. The affair begins when Anne walks into Gustavâs bedroom and gives him a handjob without bothering to lock the door. This comes soon after he brought a girl his own age home and Anne had to sit in her living room, staring at her laptop and drinking a glass of wine, while listening to the teenagers having sex. By the time Anne goes to the lake with Gustav and one of her twin girls, and Anne decides to get in the water, we know the deal is done. âBut you never swim,â says the girl. Water in Queen of Hearts bears the same prophetic sexual force thatâs appeared in many films, queer or not, from F.W. Murnauâs Sunrise to Alain Guiraudieâs Stranger by the Lake.

The affair isnât about love, of course, or passion. Itâs not even about the sex itself. The affair is a settling of accounts, a vampiric attempt to deny the passing of time, which, by virtue of having passed, feels like itâs been wasted. For Anne, the culprit is Peter, who becomes a cock-blocking nuisance. The film, a melodrama with a superb final shot that offers no closure, at times tries too hard to provide a cause for Anneâs passage Ă lâacte. When Gustav asks Anne who she lost her virginity to, she answers, âWith someone it shouldnât have been,â which makes it seem like the film is suggesting that predatorial behavior is a sort of damned inheritance. The Queen of Hearts is much more successful, and courageous, when it follows the logic of sexual yearning itself, not worrying about rational justifications.

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The first few sequences of Alejandro Landesâs Monos evoke Claire Denisâs Beau Travail, except it isnât only men training in the deserted landscape. A few young women join them, which, inevitably takes the narrative elsewhere, even if the filmsâ basic premises are similar. In Monos, teenage guerilla fighters are supposed to guard a foreign hostage, Doctora Sara Watson (Julianne Nicholson), and a conscripted cow named Shakira. Intrigue and sexual tension ensure that nothing goes according to plan. The only thing that never finds any respite is the flow of violence, which increasingly loses its metaphorical sheen, becoming gratuitous toward the end. What starts out like a social critique gains the aura of an unnecessarily grisly horror film, more about overtly visible chains than the allegorical slaughtering of cows by paramilitary children named Rambo, Lady, Bigfoot, and Smurf.

It turns out that queerness lives even in the faraway mountaintops of the Colombian jungle, as one of the guerilla girls makes two boys kiss at the start of the film, which brought a discrete discomfort to the screening room I was seated in. By the time Nicholsonâs character shares a brief lesbian kiss with a reluctant fighter whoâs supposed to watch over her, later in the film, queerness is no longer a conceptual surprise hinting at meaningful registers beyond the narrativeâs surface, but a kind of desperate attempt to make the plot seem cryptic. Like The Cossacks, Landesâs film is also about the impossibility of maintaining complete control over oneâs claim of masculinity, or power more generally. In moments of crisis, the line between predator and prey get very thin, and even the most well-armed warriors have a way of becoming disarmed, naked, and sentimental.

Yuriy Shylovâs Projectionist follows the frailty of all flesh, hawkish accessory in hand or not, through the portrayal of the end of a film projectionistâs 44-year tenure at one of Kievâs oldest movie theaters. Itâs an end that coincides with the crumbling of projectionist Valentinâs own coughing body, and that of his bedridden mother. It turns out that the movie theater, too, is reaching its expiration point. Soon, its doors will close and its employees will be fired, and thereâs a sense throughout Shylovâs documentary that analog cinema will be dealt a major blow with the theaterâs closure. What will become of the space? Perhaps a Reebok or a McDonaldâs. Perhaps a derelict muse for a Nikolaus Geyrhalter portrait of decay.

âYou think youâre loud, but in reality you can only hear yourself,â Valentin tells his mother at one point. Her futile yelling of her sonâs name from her bed is one of the most haunting motifs in the film. An uttering for utteringâs sake, a demand without expectations of an actual response, a mantra to remind oneself that one is, for now, still alive. Valentin has installed a whistle next to the bed, which he would actually be able to hear when she called if only sheâd use it. But the mother mostly refuses to blow in the pragmatic apparatus, instead finding solace in the calling that wonât be heard and, thus, will need to be repeated ad nauseam.

Projectionist can feel a bit aimless, but itâs a welcome reminder of how the materiality of film, and thus its finitude, has something in common with our ownâa kinship of frailty that the flawlessness of the digital image erases. Analog is the only technology that Valentin knows, whether heâs sewing, as heâs seen doing in the film, fixing a neighborâs straightening iron, or projecting old home videos on filthy kitchen tiles. Thereâs pleasure to be found, for Valentin, not just in the stories, concepts, and metaphors of cinema, but in the very stuff that supports his craft, the paraphernalia of cinema thatâs bound to crack, to dry out, to turn to dust, to disappear forever: film stock, Movieolas, spools, and so forth. Cinema, weâre reminded, is necessarily a tool of exposure, not just of the human condition in the face of death, but the human condition as an always gendered affair. Itâs a tool thatâs never settled, never comfortable, and never forgotten. âMen are cowards, didnât you know that?â is how Valentin puts it toward the end of Projectionist. In his world, one would know, by looking at the projector, at the very stuff of cinema, how much longer a film would last. The remainder of the filmâs âlifeâ is perfectly real, perfectly tangible, and alive because itâs in constant danger of being jammed up and torn by the very engine that ensured its running.